Off the trailNumber 09Object making

Pixels & Points

Portraits and landscapes drilled into plywood, one hole per pixel.

Kind: Milled images
Made with: A photograph, a parametric script, a CNC drill
Material: Plywood

A basset hound with its ears flying, drawn as a field of grey dots of different sizes

Object making

Furniture, ceramics and panels from three years in Woodbury's digital fabrication lab. Mostly plywood, clay, and a CNC mill.

A photograph becomes a grid of points. Each point becomes a hole, and the depth of the hole sets how dark it reads. Then the machine draws the picture.

The script samples the image, maps brightness to drill depth and spacing, and writes the toolpath. The interesting part was finding the resolution where the wood stops being noise and starts being a face.

The dog portrait at a coarse dot resolution, barely readable — Too coarse.

The dog portrait at a medium resolution, the face appearing — Getting there.

The dog portrait at a fine resolution, ears and eyes clear — Right.

Three resolutions of the same photograph.

Three plywood panels side by side, a desert landscape with buttes drilled across them — A landscape across three panels.

Portraits were the real test. A face survives surprisingly little resolution, as long as the eyes land on the right holes.

A small milled portrait of a couple in sunglasses

A wide plywood panel with a close portrait drilled faintly into the grain

A plywood panel with a group of four people drilled into it

Portraits in plywood.