Very very small numbers

December 1, 2014 1:48 PM

Do you have good eyesight and a steady hand? How about a grown-up dot-to-dot picture to pass the time? Thomas Pavitte is the author of not only the 1000 Dot to Dot Portrait book but the 1000 Dot to Dot Cities Book (video), the 1000 Dot to Dot Animals Book (video), and various others including the Mona Lisa. (free download)
posted by bq (11 comments total)

Drinks quad-shot latte

Challenge accepted.
posted by It's Never Lurgi at 1:52 PM on December 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

The point of a good dot-to-dot is that you can't tell what it's going to be until you complete it. These look nice at the end, but they completely fail at being a surprise.
posted by rikschell at 1:56 PM on December 1, 2014 [5 favorites]

Okaaaay - I tried doing the Mona Lisa one - and had trouble finding dot 5. Still - I want to do one of these....
posted by helmutdog at 2:33 PM on December 1, 2014

Oh boy! One Christmas gift down.
posted by BlueHorse at 2:35 PM on December 1, 2014

> had trouble finding dot 5

Which one is waldo?

Back when I had a lot more patience, and was a grad student trying to make some side cash doing scientific illustration, it was the fine-grained stippling (rapidograph 3x0) that sold the best. Those would have made great dot-to-dots, but I didn't do the best job of documenting which dot came before which and so would have had a hard time numbering them. (Authentically, that is, instead of just making sh*t up.)
posted by jfuller at 2:54 PM on December 1, 2014

This is great, and it reminds me of an earlier thought about why nobody's tried making an app based on this concept. I mean, paint by numbers is a thing, or was a thing, people clearly enjoy making art via training wheels, so why not an app based on a similar concept that helps people make digital art that they can point to and say "I made this". Bonus points if it can work off a picture.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 2:58 PM on December 1, 2014

My 7- and 8-year-old students LOVE doing these... they go up to 1,400 dots and aren't color coded, and you have to pick up your pencil and find the next dot sometimes, but the numbers are always pretty close to one another, so it's not TOO challenging. You can't tell at all what a lot of the pictures are, too, so that's a bonus.
posted by Huck500 at 3:04 PM on December 1, 2014 [4 favorites]

Mr.Encyclopedia: "This is great, and it reminds me of an earlier thought about why nobody's tried making an app based on this concept."

I know it's not exactly what you're describing, but something like this exists for the 3DS under the omnipotent Pokemon franchise
posted by andycyca at 4:23 PM on December 1, 2014

StippleGen is close - it doesn't number the dots for you though. It CAN however create a near-shortest continuous loop that makes some nice art in its own right. (for more info, google "TSP art.")
posted by Wulfhere at 6:23 PM on December 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

So you'd need an algorithm to reduce an arbitrary image to a single line. Once you've got that, reducing that single line to segments and then numbered dots is trivial. But I suspect the first bit is substantially non-trivial.
posted by motty at 8:13 PM on December 1, 2014

Do you have good eyesight and a steady hand?

No and no.
posted by Splunge at 6:29 AM on December 2, 2014