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Subdivision

One rectangle cut in two, then both halves cut in two, until something says stop. Layout rather than texture.

Output

A set shares every setting — paper, border, the sketch’s own knobs — and differs only in the seed. Regenerate any one of them without touching the others.

PNG: 3508 × 4961 px at 300 dpi. PDF: vector, RGB, 297 × 420 mm page, no bleed. Printed area 297 × 420 mm.

0 mm

Millimetres of unprinted paper on every side. The piece is composed to fit what is left, not shrunk to fit it.

Splitting

7

Cuts from the whole sheet down to a leaf. Every extra level can double the number of pieces.

Cutting the longer side keeps every piece roughly square; cutting at random makes slivers.

0.18

How far from the middle the cut can fall, as a fraction of the side.

0.12

Chance a piece is left alone rather than cut again. What makes the sizes uneven.

40

A piece this small is never cut again, whatever the depth says.

Drawing

5.0

Space taken off every piece. It compounds with depth, so shallow pieces sit further apart than deep ones.

0.55
8.0
1.25

Colour

How it works

Take a rectangle, cut it in two, and do the same to both halves until something says stop. That is the whole algorithm, and it is here because it is the only piece in the set whose output is a hierarchy rather than a field or a path. Every leaf knows how deep it is, and the recursion nests strictly, which is why the result reads as composed even though nothing composed it. Where a flow field gives you texture, this gives you layout.

Three decisions make all the difference and all three are controls. Which way to cut: across the longer side keeps every piece roughly square, while cutting a side at random makes slivers. Where along the side: dead centre gives graph paper, and the jitter is what stops it. And when to stop, which is a probability rather than a depth — that is what makes the sizes uneven. Early stopping is held back until the sheet has been cut a few times, because one unlucky roll at the top level otherwise leaves a third of the page as a single blank rectangle.

The gutter is taken off every piece rather than off every cut, so it compounds with depth: shallow pieces sit further apart than deep ones, and the hierarchy is legible in the spacing without anything drawing it. What goes inside a leaf — flat colour, hatching, nested rectangles, a dot grid — is decided per piece and is the only part of this that is decoration rather than structure.

R regenerate · S PNG · P PDF