Logbook 2026-11-09

Today the Lab got its second experiment: The Scenes.

It comes from a limit of my illustrations. They draw one object at a time, which works for an idea but not for a place or a moment, and some essays need one: a landscape, a room, people doing something. I wanted a style of imagery that could show those scenes in detail, made from the site’s own cells.

Before any code, I gathered a few inspirations, complex compositions in dither and in ASCII, to set the level of detail I was after.

The first version drew in glyphs. Next, I fine-tuned it to draw in the style of the site’s cells: the line families become fine strokes that run on from one cell to the next, and together they draw light, shade and texture.

For now the experiment draws one scene, a pond at night, and it lives. The grass leans in the wind, the water spreads rings and ripples its reflections, the stars twinkle, a lantern flickers, and rain can fall over it all. The picture doesn’t simply appear: it starts as an abstract field of its own strokes, and each one draws in towards its place until the pond is there. Its playground replays that entrance, switches each motion on and off, and tries the scene in every accent, down to Ink, the page’s greys, in light and in dark.

Next will come the scene maker: a private tool, like the illustrator, to turn a photo or a painting into a scene. The pond is the first test, not the point. The real one is what a scene from a real reference becomes.