Drawn in a thousand dots.

THE SYSTEM BEHIND THE SURFACE

Inside Stipple Relief.

A sheet with broad, slow folds is lit from one side and printed the way a stippler draws: ink dots, one to each cell of a grid and each nudged off its centre, so the spacing is even without falling into rows. A dot's size is the tone it carries. Where the sheet is light, small dark dots sit on pale paper; as it darkens they grow and merge into a mesh, and where it falls away only small pale specks remain on deep ink, one continuous print from light to deep. The dots stay where they are and only grow and shrink, so as the folds roll the print breathes instead of shimmering. A lens of glass follows the cursor and magnifies the print under it, dots and all. Instead of the sheet, the print can carry an image or a video, its own rose and candle clips or the visitor's file, printed in the same dots, and Invert prints it as a negative; this page opens on petals falling through the dark, printed in ink on pale paper.

Stipple Relief imitates a stippled print on screen: it does not produce vector stipple files or plotter paths, and its folded sheet is a lit height field, not a 3D model. Images and videos play in the browser; they are not uploaded.

3.08 ms GPU timestamp median; p95 3.146 ms. 1440x900 @ dpr 2; Apple M2 (8-core GPU), Metal driver on macOS Version 26.6.2 (Build 25G83); measured 2026-10-12. This is a recorded headless sample, not a browser FPS or mobile-performance guarantee.