Letterpress prints using dice as “type”

Craft & Design Fun & Games
Letterpress prints using dice as “type”
stukenborg.jpg
stukenborg1.jpg
stukenborg2.jpg

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]

24 thoughts on “Letterpress prints using dice as “type”

  1. ashleyelva says:

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

  2. Sean Michael Ragan says:

    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.

  3. ashleyelva says:

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

    1. Sean Michael Ragan says:

      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.”

  4. Brandon Ferguson says:

    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.

  5. shing says:

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

  6. jitenshadesu says:

    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

    1. Sean Michael Ragan says:

      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.

  7. jitenshadesu says:

    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.

  8. jitenshadesu says:

  9. docphil says:

    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

  10. Irma Eugenia Alva says:

    Great!

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I am descended from 5,000 generations of tool-using primates. Also, I went to college and stuff. I am a long-time contributor to MAKE magazine and makezine.com. My work has also appeared in ReadyMade, c't – Magazin für Computertechnik, and The Wall Street Journal.

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