Letterpress prints using dice as "type"

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By Sean Michael Ragan
Posted 2010/03/30 @ 6:09 am
Category Art & Design, Fun & Games, General

From Etsy seller Stukenborg. It occurs to me that, besides (the admittedly beautiful) geometric patterns shown here, one could probably work out a way to do monochrome images this way. [via Dude Craft]

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12 Responses to Letterpress prints using dice as "type"

ashleyelva on March 30th, 2010 at 6:50 am said:

These prints are monochrome, which just means one color. The one color is red, and the paper happens to be yellow.

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Sean Michael Ragan on March 30th, 2010 at 7:01 am said:

I was talking about monochrome images, like photographic images. I was saying one could do realistic images where each die was a single pixel, and I was presuming that such images would be “monochrome,” but of course you could do multiple prints on the same substrate with different inks to even do multicolor images.

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ashleyelva on March 30th, 2010 at 10:07 am said:

Ah. The art student in me was prepared to defend the only black is monochrome idea. I misunderstood.

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- Sean Michael Ragan on March 31st, 2010 at 4:06 pm said:
  
  Heh. =] Well, that’s probably more my fault than yours. To paraphrase my favorite Hitchcock movie, “I sometimes choose words for sound, rather than meaning.”
  
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Brandon Ferguson on March 30th, 2010 at 12:00 pm said:

Actually some people have done exactly that (I can think of another besides this person): http://www.elusivesnark.com/2008/11/carolines-dice-portrait.html

From the post: The method for producing the final visualization is essentially a special case of vector quantization. First, the original image is downscaled to a six step gray palette. Then each of the six shades of gray are assigned to a dice value: 1 corresponds to black while a value of 6 represents white.

Pretty sweet.

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shing on March 30th, 2010 at 12:38 pm said:

this is really cool! i’d totally love to see wallpaper that looked like that(for walls, not desktops).

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jitenshadesu on April 1st, 2010 at 1:11 pm said:

after seeing this post i decided to take a stab at it. This is the result i came up with using metapixel, a command line mosaic tool for linux.

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4069/4482553536_f5287b43ff_o.png

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- Sean Michael Ragan on April 2nd, 2010 at 6:06 am said:
  
  That’s very cool. I did not know about Metapixel. Do you have command line, config, settings, or other info about how you did it so other folks could re-create? If so, I will gladly post. You can e-mail me at sean@makezine.com.
  
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jitenshadesu on April 1st, 2010 at 1:15 pm said:

sorry for the double post, but i’m new here and don’t see and edit option…

anywho, you may recognize it as a famous manray photograph. you may also notice that i have chosen both black and white dice rather than one over the other to increase the range of tones.

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jitenshadesu on April 1st, 2010 at 2:21 pm said:

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docphil on April 26th, 2010 at 5:23 am said:

Are there any other programs that can be used to do the dice mosaics? I don’t run linux, so I can’t use metapixel. Thanks

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Irma Eugenia Alva on September 6th, 2011 at 1:26 pm said:

Great!

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