Samurai Emerges

This is another drawing by my friend Jeff Johnson, the comic book artist behind Samurai in Motion. Here every pen stroke he drew is lying flat on a single line, each one right under where it belongs in the picture. Rub the line and whatever stands above that spot gets up. Stop, and after a moment he lies back down.

There are two ways for him to get up:

• Reverse Jenga. Each stroke stands up whole, so he goes together a piece at a time, like a tower being built instead of knocked down.
• Accordion. Nothing comes apart. The whole drawing stretches up out of the line in one piece, wide open under your cursor and folding back down at the sides like the bellows of an accordion.

Reach sets how much of him you wake up at once. Linger sets how long he stays up.

What I’d like to hear: which one feels more like Jeff’s drawing coming to life, and which feels more like a magic trick?

Where this comes from

People sometimes ask whose technique this is. Mostly, it’s mine. I built it with Claude, writing the code from scratch rather than starting from someone else’s project. The drawing is Jeff’s.

It grew out of Line to Signature, which does the same thing with my handwriting. The wobble is a spring, the same physics Robert Hooke worked out in the 1670s and the same math behind nearly every bouncy animation on the web. The springy feel started with a jelly-like button in a GIF from a uxdesign.cc article, “Design in the material you ship,” which set off this whole run of experiments.

The part we worked out ourselves is the trick of laying every pen stroke flat on the stretch of line beneath it, so a drawing can stand back up out of a single line. I don’t know of anyone who’s done exactly this. Animated drawings are everywhere, though, so I wouldn’t swear nobody has.