Background

My wife and I moved to London in early 2017. One of the first things we did when we got here was visit the Tate Museum. While there, I walked by a subtle trio of drawings by an artist I had never heard of. I took a photo of my favorite and kept walking.

It is about two years later (July 2019) and we now have a five month old daughter. As soon as she was born we immediately started to back up every photo we ever took of anything. It was during this process that I stumbled upon my original image:

The artist is Lenore Tawney, an American who worked in the mid-20th century. She is actually more well-known for her work with “fiber” and yarn but she has what I think is a beautiful collection of Ink Drawings.

The one I captured at the Tate that day in 2017 is called “Reflected Ray”. I loved the geometry and simplicity of this work. The medium of simple ink on 1960’s industrial draft paper I thought was also really beautiful and cool.

Using ggpomological

I ran into ggpomological a while ago and I thought it looked awesome. Unfortunately, I didn’t see much application in the work environment where I spend 99% of my R time. When I was looking at the Lenore Tawney artwork again today though I thought it would be a fun application of the paint_pomological() feature which uses magick to give a ggplot output the look of hand-drawing on paper. In this demo I’ll use this feature to make a pretty cool rendering of Lenore Tawney’s Reflected Ray in ggplot.

R Code

We’ll use ggplot2 for plotting, and ggpomological for the theme and paper effect.

require( 'ggplot2')
require( 'ggpomological')

In order to generate the dataset, I visually picked out the x and y coordinates for the main nodes, categorized the lines into some rough “groups” based on their color and what component of the entire illustration I thought they comprised, and then counted the number of lines between the nodes of that smaller component. I then evenly spaced lines in between the starting and ending nodes in order to generate the rough x and y coordinates for the entire component.

I uploaded the file with the resulting data to my repo for this site:

d.in <- readr::read_csv('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Twoy519/peakmaximum/master/data_assets/reflected_ray_data.csv')

head(d.in)

## # A tibble: 6 x 6
##   line_group                     color    x1    y1    x2    y2
##   <chr>                          <chr> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>
## 1 bottom_right_boundary_leftwing dark     15  24    80     16 
## 2 bottom_left_boundary_left_wing dark     80  16   145     24 
## 3 top_boundary_left_wing         dark     15 110    67    122 
## 4 bottom_to_left_wing            dark     15  24    72    110 
## 5 bottom_to_left_wing            dark     17  23.8  71.6  111.
## 6 bottom_to_left_wing            dark     19  23.5  71.2  112.

I originally thought I was going to have to do something crazy with geom_line but a quick check for a better way revealed geom_segment to be a one-liner. Each line has a color as well as the starting point {x1, y1} and the ending point {x2, y2}. We can feed these coordinates into geom_segment’s x1, xend, y1 and yend aesthetics.

plt <- ggplot(d.in) +
  geom_segment(aes(x=x1, y=y1, xend=x2, yend=y2, color=color), alpha = 0.2) +
  scale_x_continuous(
    limits = c(0,160)
    , breaks = seq(0,160, by = 10)
    , minor_breaks = seq(0,160, by = 1)
    , expand = c(0,0)
  ) +
  scale_y_continuous(
    limits = c(0,200)
    , breaks = seq(0,200, by = 10)
    , minor_breaks = seq(0,200, by = 1)
    , expand = c(0,0)
    , position='right'
  ) +
  labs(
    caption='Reflected ray'
  ) +
  theme_pomological_fancy() +
  theme(
    legend.position = 'none'
    , axis.text = element_blank()
    , axis.title = element_blank()
    , panel.grid.major = element_line(color = '#E4AA84', size = 0.5, linetype=1)
    , panel.grid.minor = element_line(color = '#E4AA84', size = 0.25, linetype=1)
    , panel.border = element_rect(color = '#E4AA84')
    , plot.caption = element_text(hjust = 0, color = 'dark gray')
  ) +
  scale_color_manual(values=c('black','#8F0F01'))

plt

paint_pomological(
  plt
  , res = 110
  , width = 180 * 5
  , height = 220 * 5
)