Patterned strokes

These strokes are made up of many small elements rather than one solid shape: short, rounded dashes spaced along the spine; uneven, hand-drawn dots; and longer strips placed loosely enough to overlap. The elements fill the stroke's width and follow its taper. Each row across the width follows the arc from the start, using its own seeded random sequence. As the stroke grows, new elements are added at the tip without shifting those already in place.

The placement stays the same, but each element is rendered as a wet mark that pulls the background along. A dash or strip samples colors behind it along its direction and blends them, with the strongest pull near its tail. This makes each element look like a short stroke of wet paint. A dot draws the surrounding color inward, creating a blot. The sampled background is tinted with the element's color.

Small strokes sprout from both sides of the spine, angled away from its local direction (45 degrees by default). Their length scales with the local width, filling the stroke's band and tapering with it. There are three styles: feather, with each left-right pair sharing one color and alternating colors between pairs to create feather-like bands; leaves, with tapered, leaf-shaped sprouts in random sizes, from much shorter than the band is wide to much longer; and fringe, which is thinner and denser, with a different color on each side of the spine.

These strokes create graphic patterns by resampling the ribbon.

Pixels: Cells are stamped outward from the spine, with duplicates removed by grid coordinate. The inside test uses signed distance from the spine, allowing the left and right widths to remain independent.

Facets: The spine is resampled at wider intervals, and each triangle is filled with a flat color. Jittering the vertices across the width breaks up both the shading and the silhouette.

Lanes: Each lane is a separate, thin ribbon offset across the width, allowing it to follow the curve.

Try drawing freely with the tools on this page.