Scroll Bitmap

This scroll is one piece in a series of works using mathematical functions to capture salient aspects of the appearance of religious objects. Such mathematical modeling yields insight into the nature of religious ornamentation. The left and right scrolls are cylinders of decreasing radii. The middle parchment is a sin wave. The holders for the scrolls are obtained as sine functions around a cylinder to simulate lathed wood. Columnar writing is simulated as bands of varying intensity, using modular arithmetic to separate columns and rows at even intervals. The apparent variation in the height of letters and the texture of the parchment was achieved by allowing every pixel to deviate randomly by a small amount from its assigned value. MATLAB's interpolation algorithm blends these random perturbations to make the surface appear smooth but textured.