This project is a typology of the extraction of leaf skeletons.
As someone who has always been fascinated by the systematic and complex nature of maps， I somehow found that the skeleton of leaves speaks a similar language to maps. They are all systematic, well-structured, and direct a flow of nature.
In the past few weeks, I’ve collected 70+ leaves from North Oakland, Shadyside, and Squirrel Hill areas as a flaneur to start my project. After that, I put leaves on a LED light board and documented them with a camera to catch more details of them. Then I use photoshop, and imageJ to read the binary information in the image to extract leaves skeletons. I also collected a lot of city maps: sometimes the city maps fit so well into the leaf’s skeleton, and sometimes the city maps show some similarity with the leaf’s structure.
Throughout the process of extracting the skeleton of leaves, the connection between the human-made structured map and the nature-made leaf skeletons is gradually shown. Compared to conventional maps, Leaf skeletons are more organic and invite people to think: where are these branches leading? Does every piece of leaf serve as a mini portrait of the great place where people lived in?
In general, I’m very fascinated by the details that a leaves skeleton has given me and I enjoyed the process of collecting leaves and observing them, which is like a practice of meditation. Sometimes while extracting binary information and skeletonizing the images, some details will surprisingly come out and create a pattern that I cannot read with human eyes.
I also learned how to simplify an art idea and do it well. Extracting leaf skeletons is not as easy as I thought: It indeed needs very careful documentation and processing.
One thing that needs to be put more effort into is the extraction process. I did not make a clean “skeletonized” diagram because the textures and patterns of different leaves are very hard to control, so there were some problems that occurred when I tried to use the “make binary” command: some detailed information was lost and thus lost consistency of the leaves. Due to this reason, even though I’ve collected 70+ leaves, it turns out that only 20+ leaves are successfully extracted.