Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Print In Progress - The Other Half of the Untitled Diptych - With Bonus Math

© 2014 Hannah Phelps

If you put this print to the right of the one you saw in the last post, it makes a bigger complete image. When 2 small prints create a larger composition it is called a diptych.

You could do the same thing with more than 2 pieces - there are triptychs (3 parts) and tetraptychs (4 parts). Instead of going too far with this, after 4 you can just say polyptych.

The trick when creating an image out of smaller pieces is that all the pieces need to be able to stand on their own AND work in the whole, finished piece. 

You end up with more art possibilities that way. To put it mathematically (you know, for fun):

Number of complete art ideas from an n-tych, in which n equals the number of component images = n + 1

In our case, n = 2, so we have 3 art ideas:

                    1. both pieces together 
                    2. the left half alone
                    3. the right half alone

Now that I am thinking about it, I suppose when n is greater than 2 you could hang some component images and not others.... Hmmm.

So a more accurate equation would be:

Number of complete art ideas from an n-tych = n! + 1 

Remember from math class that:

 n! = n x (n-1) x (n-2) x ...(n-(n-1))

But that equation assumes that any of the smaller component images would look nice next any of the others.....

Ok, ok, I know I have totally lost some of you and this is not a math blog, it is an art blog, so we will start over in the next post by posting these two prints together in their proper order and talking about how I made them and there won't be any math. 

Deal?


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