Fugitive Pigments
A poetry broadside: an original poem under a spray-stencilled title, illustrated entirely with paintkit brushes.
How it is made
The poem is about impermanence, typeset in Palatino under a title spray-stencilled through its own charpath outline. The illustration is all paintkit brushes: the Milky Way is pkspray cloud and star dust along two shared curves, the moon wears a spray halo, the reeds are pknib tapers with spray-dab seed heads, and the field is pkdry broken texture.
Details
- Category
- Painting
- Tags
- lettering
- Libraries
- artkit, paintkit
- Added
- 2026-08-24
- Built in
- issue #84
- Page size
- 620 × 1000 points
Source
View source the whole program in a scrolling window, or read gallery/fugitive_pigments.ps on GitHub. To draw it yourself, from a checkout of the repository:
pscat --page 620x1000 gallery/fugitive_pigments.psThe first 40 of 252 lines of the source
%!PS-Adobe-3.0
%%Title: Fugitive Pigments — a poetry broadside for the paintkit brushes
%%BoundingBox: 0 0 620 1000
%%EndComments
% A poetry broadside: an original poem, typeset in Palatino, illustrated
% end to end with the painterly brushes. The title is spray-stenciled
% through its own charpath; the milky way is pkspray deposition along
% two curved centerlines (soft cloud passes plus a fine speck pass over
% the same walks); the moon wears a spray halo; the horizon glow is
% spray hugging a low line; the reeds are pknib tapers, each seed head
% a small spray dab; the field is pkdry broken texture. Almost nothing
% on the page is a plain stroke or fill — the brushes are the ink.
%
% pscat --page 620x1000 gallery/fugitive_pigments.ps
(lib/artkit.ps) run
(lib/paintkit.ps) run
84 srand
/noct0 [0.02 0.03 0.08] def
/noct1 [0.07 0.10 0.22] def
/noct2 [0.13 0.55 0.72] def
/noct3 [0.25 0.90 0.85] def
/noct4 [0.95 0.35 0.65] def
/parch4 [0.93 0.91 0.87] def
/parch3 [0.82 0.78 0.72] def
/ember3 [0.98 0.55 0.12] def
/ember4 [1.00 0.85 0.40] def
/dusk3 [0.85 0.48 0.34] def
/dusk4 [0.98 0.80 0.53] def
% --- ground: deep indigo, lifting toward the top ----------------------
noct0 aload pop setrgbcolor clippath fill
% A breath of lighter indigo high in the sky, so the top never reads
% as flat black behind the title.
noct1 aload pop setrgbcolor