Contour Line Drawing
Hand it a photograph and it comes back as contour lines — every line a closed loop at one depth, none of them crossing, none of them stopping in mid-air, with the spacing doing all the shading. Two fields.
We made two examples, from two different photographs: a shaved head, whose form is all subtle turns, and a pear beside an apple, whose form is simple. On the fruit the contour lines come out clean; on the face they start to fray.
Lines never cross, the spacing between them does all the shading, and there is no grey, fill or hatching. Simple forms like fruit give you clean, closed, nested loops. On a face many lines stop in mid-air instead of closing, and generating again does not fix it. Use this on things with simple form.
Generated for this library
Input
Nearest the tip of the nose
Furthest the back of the shaved head
How many about twenty-five lines between them
Photograph portrait.png (1254 x 1254)
Returned 1 image · 1:1 · the head as contours
crossings none anywhere in either run
loops proper nested rings round the eye socket
and the whole ear
spacing crowds where the cheek turns away, opens
out across the forehead
form the head reads as sliced rather than
hatched
endings still there - short strokes that stop in
mid-air on the cheek and jaw, and by
measurement more of them than before
words none, in any scriptYou fill in 2 fields — the braced lines at the top. Everything below them is fixed.
- 1What is nearest the camera, and what is furthest
- 2How many lines between them
Contour Line Drawing
What this makes
Hand it a photograph and it comes back as contour lines — every line a closed loop at one depth, none of them crossing, none of them stopping in mid-air, with the spacing doing all the shading. Two fields.
The whole template, in one piece. The steps below are the entire workflow.
How to use it
- Copy the whole template with the button above.
- Attach the photograph and paste the template in the same message.
- Replace the two FIELDS lines. Name the nearest and furthest points precisely — a tip, a corner, an edge.
- Trace one line with a finger. It should either come back to where it started or leave the picture, and it should never meet another.
- If the lines are evenly spaced everywhere, the run has drawn a pattern. Spacing has to tighten where the surface turns away.
What you swap
- What is nearest the camera, and what is furthest
- the tip of the nose is nearest; the back of the shaved head is furthest
- How many lines between them
- about twenty-five lines from the nose to the back of the head
Before it runs
- A photograph, attached to the message, with real form in it. A flat, evenly lit subject has no depth for the lines to slice, and comes back as a decorative ripple.
- Light that describes the shape. Contours are read out of the modelling, so a side-lit face works and a face lit straight-on does not.
- Two ends you can name. The lines run between them, and without both the run has no idea where to start counting.
- Acceptance that texture is gone. Contours describe where a surface is, not what it is made of — hair, cloth and skin all come out as the same lines.
When to reach for it
When a shape should be shown as a shape: a cover, a poster, a section divider, a piece of packaging, a laser cut. Templates in this genre ask for a topographic line effect and hand back decorative wavy lines that cross each other and stop wherever they like, which is a pattern rather than a description of a form.
What changes
- One photograph in, one contour drawing out — the form described entirely by lines at fixed depths.
- Lines never cross and never branch, because two different depths cannot be in the same place.
- Every line either closes on itself or runs off the edge of the picture; none of them just stops.
- Spacing carries the steepness, so the lines crowd where the surface turns away and open out where it is flat.
- One image, no shading, no type, no border, no grid.
Pairs with
- Pure Line Drawing EffectHand it a photograph and it comes back as pure line — no tone anywhere, and depth carried entirely by which line stops where two things overlap, because that is the only thing a line drawing has left. Two fields.
- Backlit Silhouette EffectHand it a photograph and it comes back as a cut silhouette lit from behind — no interior anywhere, so every part that has to be recognised must reach the edge and show itself against the light. Two fields.
- Chalkboard Drawing EffectHand it a photograph and it comes back drawn in chalk on a black board — where the darkest thing in the picture is bare board, because chalk adds light and there is no way to draw a dark line. Two fields.