Posted by asciiart to start off 2024, the year of the dragon in the Chinese calendar.
The Icelandic Vegvísir (wayfinder) is a magical stave that helps you find your way home through rough weather. Oldest known example is from 1860.
Self Destruction by Shadow, for Galza. Made sometime between 1999 and 2004.
Examples from Bruno Munari‘s Curve di Peano series (1970’s) and the Negativo Positivo series (1950’s).
The red lines are quillwork, made with porcupine quills. This technique was used for hundreds of years before beadwork became popular in the 1800s with glass beads from Venice.
These kinds of triangles are called step triangles.
The dark blue shapes are called buffalo tracks, space or part-between.
Tripe design.
“Two-color, elongated diamond shapes are usually called the Feather, Whirlwind or Breath of Life design.”
Four directions
Women of several tribes started making moccasins with beaded soles in the 1880s.
“Twisted design” (beads in diagonal checker rows)
Box designs. The squares often represented bags.
Boxes with inverted triangles were common in the Shoshone tribe, therefore known as Shoeshone design.
All images and information from Wyoming State Museum’s Beautiful Shoes (2012) which also explains different techniques, and the same museum’s moccasin page at Göögle Arts & Culture.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, composed of 17,000 monotype characters and a tinted background in the shape of the head (1935). source
Valto Malmiola’s portrait of Sibelius, 1937. It was made with 30,000 so-called rules – strips of metal, often brass or type-cast metal, used for printing lines since the 1500’s.
More works by Valto Malmiola, made with the same technique, 1938-1943.
Images and info from Typographic Art of Valto Malmiola by Heikki Lotvonen, 2023. He mentions that for example Carl Fasol used this technique before Malmiola.
Lena Weber makes incredible variable typefaces that are very graphical, like Gradial used here. It doesn’t look like it, but all this is made of (variable) text characters. Like these: