The Blocks Do the Verb

The Blocks Do the Verb

Produce ONE image, 1:1 square: an abstract risograph-style poster made of flat colour masses. Follow every line. Replace only the FIELDS block; everything after it is fixed.

First — do you have the fields?

If any field below still has braces around it, stop and ask. Put all the questions in one short message, and show the example under each one so they can see the shape of a useful answer. Wait for the replies, then draw. Never fill a brace yourself: a value you invented is a value nobody asked for, and it will look exactly as considered as the ones they did give you.

Ask in whatever language they are writing to you in. Translate the questions and the examples; do not make someone read English to tell you what they want.

The examples are only examples. If someone answers a question, use their answer; never fall back to the example because you prefer it.

If the fields are already filled in, ignore this and carry on.

Fields — replace these six lines only

• The sentence: {the line being translated} e.g. Everything you liked, gathered where you can find it again
• The relationship the blocks perform: {one, named} e.g. many becoming one — scattered pieces gathering into a single mass
• The direction it runs: {across the frame} e.g. from the edges inward
• The two states: {what the start looks like, what the end looks like} e.g. start: dozens of small hard-edged chips around the border, all different colours · end: one large soft-cornered mass at the centre, its colour the overlap of all of them
• The palette: {a stock, and up to three inks} e.g. warm bone ground; cobalt, vermilion, mustard
• A title, or none: {a short line, or none} e.g. none

The translation law

Refusing to be literal is not a translation.

Templates in this style say: do not draw knowledge as a book, light as a beam, growth as a tree. Good advice, and on its own it produces handsome abstraction that means nothing — because once the literal option is gone, nothing says what the shapes should do instead.

So the blocks perform a relationship, and the relationship is named. Take exactly one:

• many becoming one — separate pieces gathering into a single mass
• one becoming many — a mass breaking into pieces
• one covering another — a mass hiding what is under it
• two making a third — two masses overlapping, the overlap a new colour and the real subject
• one pressing another aside — displacement, everything bent around it
• one passing through another — entering one side, emerging the other
• one holding another — nesting, contained and containing

Whatever the sentence claims is happening, that is the relationship. Nothing else in the picture competes with it.

The direction law

The relationship runs along one stated direction — left to right, bottom to top, edge to centre, corner to corner. The eye must be able to travel it.

Something has to change *monotonically* along that path so the journey is readable: the pieces get larger, or fewer, or softer, or darker, step by step. A change that happens all at once in the middle is an event; a change that happens along a direction is a sentence.

The two states

The start and end must be visibly different in the way the fields state — in count, in size, in edge quality, in colour. If both ends look like the same kind of thing, nothing has happened.

The swap test

This is how to know it worked.

Imagine a completely unrelated sentence in place of the real one — a market at dawn, the sea at night, a long argument. If this same picture would serve that sentence just as well, it is decoration.

A reference run of this style was given a line about complex knowledge becoming light you could carry. It returned a dense fragmented corner and a warm glow elsewhere — the two states present, and simply coexisting. Nothing gathered, nothing travelled, nothing became anything. It is a beautiful print and it would have illustrated any sentence at all.

The printing

• Flat masses only. Large, full, weighty organic and geometric shapes: beans, leaves, drops, rounded triangles, half-discs, cut paper silhouettes. No line work, no icons, no small scattered detail.
• Overprint makes the extra colours. Where two inks cross, a genuine third colour appears, darker than both. That is the only way a fourth colour may enter.
• Slight misregistration at some edges — one ink a hair out of place, showing a sliver.
• Riso grain on the masses and along their edges: visible noise, uneven ink, a starved edge here and there.
• The stock is never white — bone, oatmeal, warm grey, clay, ochre. It shows through everywhere the inks are not.

Never

• ✕ any recognisable object, figure, building, plant or landscape
• ✕ shapes arranged without a stated relationship between them
• ✕ a change that cannot be traced along a direction
• ✕ a white background, a gradient, or realistic light
• ✕ 3D rendering, glass, metal, or drop shadows
• ✕ line-dominant or icon-dominant composition
• ✕ more than three inks before overprinting

The result

A print that turns out to be about something: three inks on tinted stock, one relationship acted out from one side of the frame to the other, and a change you could describe out loud without ever having been told the sentence.