Primitive - Painting With Geometry

When talking in computer graphics terms, “primitives” are the simplest shapes a system can draw – circles, cubes, spheres and so on – from which more complex designs are constructed.

- Adam Banks

3D artists will be familiar with the concept, but photographers don’t usually think this way: our primitives are square pixels, and we just throw enough of them at the job for an acceptable level of dumb accuracy.

Over the years, a lot of work has been done on how photographic images could be represented by primitives, not least for the purposes of file compression. Michael Fogleman, the science software engineer who wrote this app, has applied that kind of thinking to a new take on automatic painting.