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Drawings that move when you do: portraits, gardens and page footers drawn in code as SVG, each with a skill your AI agent can follow to make one like it.

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delineate

d3lin3at3 · Drawings that move when you do.

Node.js 24+ TypeScript 7 Runtime dependencies: none Agent skills: 5 License: MIT Last commit

Portraits that come apart, gardens that grow as you scroll, small worlds at the foot of a web page, a page made in front of you by a crew of hands, a vase that keeps changing its flowers, and a page not found that has sunk. Everything is drawn in code, and each piece comes with its source, and most with a skill your AI agent can follow to make one like it.

The name is delineate: to draw the outline of something. Its handle, d3lin3at3, writes each e as a 3. On the project's page the 3s turn over as you scroll and show the e on their backs.

The work

What it is Code Skill
Garden Twelve gardens from around the world, drawn plant by plant in watercolour and ink. They grow in as you scroll, and four of them run through a whole year. garden/ climate-garden
Footers The bottom of a web page drawn as a small world that rises as you arrive. Seven worlds, each in its own medium, from gouache to crayon, by day and by night. footers/
Portraits Illustrated portraits redrawn in vector as planes, each at its own depth. Pull them apart and they keep moving. portraits/ layered-svg
Characters A picture made of letters. Ring by ring from each shape's edge inward they spell the name, and at the heart leaves and flowers grow, or moons, or stars. characters/
Collage Five sculptures from their museums' scans, each drawn as an engraving, a line screen, flat marble and a single line, and laid among scraps of paper on a card that cuts from hand to hand. collage/
Assembly A page made in front of you by a crew of hands that move the way people do: guides pulled down, frames dragged out, words typed key by key, and a still life drawn in crayon, stroke by stroke, by twenty pens at once. assembly/ assembly
Monoline Flowers from the Garden's climates put in glass, drawn with one pen on three angles. An arrangement grows, is taken back into its bottle, and the bottle becomes the next, under a palette rolled for its flowers. monoline/ monoline-geometric
Flotsam The page for an address that leads nowhere. It has sunk: the window is a tank of water and the 404 floats in it, cut from plywood. Shake the window, or tip your phone, and the water slops; fish a numeral out and throw it back. flotsam/

And the studies, smaller pieces that delineate's page lists in its footer rather than shows:

What it is Code Skill
Rain A figure seen from behind under an umbrella, in a rain of written characters that trail rings, break on the canopy and lie down where they land. She becomes him and he becomes her, and the colours turn, by day or by night. rain/ glyph-rain
Glass A solid of clear glass that follows your pointer over lines of words and drawings from the Garden, bending them and turning them over. The glass melts from a ring into a tetrahedron, a sphere, a cube and on, and the page beneath melts from words into a plant and back. glass/ sdf-glass

site/ builds delineate's own page, which shows all of it on one long sheet.

Agent skills

A skill is a folder of instructions that an AI coding agent loads when a task calls for it. The six here live in .agents/skills/, and .claude/skills/ links to them for Claude Code.

  • climate-garden researches how a set of real plants looks, draws each one, colours the garden for day and night, lays it out for every screen, and checks the result.
  • layered-svg turns a picture into a layered, animated SVG in a style you choose, working from coarse to fine the way a painter does.
  • assembly makes a page that a crew of hands builds in front of its reader, from the first guide to the last crayon stroke, moving the way people move and working the way a design team works.
  • monoline-geometric puts flowers in glass on the Monoline card: a plant, a garden or a bottle drawn with one pen on three angles, under a palette rolled for its flowers.
  • glyph-rain makes Rain: a person built bone by bone, with no line drawn, under a rain of characters, in quiet palettes for dark and light.
  • sdf-glass makes Glass: a solid raymarched in one shader, refracting the page beneath it and melting from shape to shape while the page melts from words to drawings, at the screen's own rate.

Open the repository in your agent and ask for what you want, such as "a garden for the Patagonian steppe" or "this portrait as a line engraving". The matching skill takes it from there.

Getting started

You need Node.js 24 or later. Node runs the TypeScript as it stands, so the tools need no build step. The screenshot and benchmark tools also drive your installed Google Chrome.

npm install
npm run dev    # the Garden at http://localhost:5173, rebuilt whenever you save
Command What it does
npm run dev Draws the plants, builds the Garden, serves it, and rebuilds when a source changes.
npm run build Type-checks everything and builds the Garden into garden/dist/.
npm run look Takes screenshots of every garden layout, by day and by night.
npm run footers Writes the Footers demo to footers/automaton.html. Add ?world=crayon, or another world, to choose one.
npm run bench Serves the portrait bench at http://localhost:5288.
npm run collage:render -- <motif> Renders a Collage motif's sculpture scan in Blender into the passes its drawings are made from.
npm run collage:draw Draws every Collage motif in each of its hands into collage/art/.
npm run assembly Serves Assembly at http://localhost:5310/, with the pointers' specimen sheet at studies/pointers/, and rebuilds when a source changes.
npm run flotsam Serves Flotsam at http://localhost:5340/, at every address, and rebuilds when a source changes.
npm run monoline Serves Monoline's card at http://localhost:5350/, with ?sheet for a dozen arrangements at once and ?layers for one layer alone, and rebuilds when a source changes.
npm run rain Serves Rain at http://localhost:5360/, with ?rate=0 for the figure alone and ?mode= for dark or light, and rebuilds when a source changes.
npm run glass Serves Glass at http://localhost:5370/, with ?shape= to start as one shape, ?still to hold it in the middle and ?picture to open on a drawing, and rebuilds when a source changes.
npm run flotsam:measure Measures Flotsam in a Chrome of its own: the page's frames, the water's thread, and whether the water sleeps when still.
npm run site Builds delineate's site into site/dist/: its page, and the Garden, the Footers demo, Characters, Collage, Paprika Girl's separation page and Assembly that its sections open, Rain and Glass, which its footer lists, and Flotsam as its 404.html. Collage needs npm run collage:draw first. It also renders, in Chrome, the card a shared link shows.
npm run deploy Builds the site and publishes it to GitHub Pages, at https://delineate.appautomaton.com/. Pushing main runs it first, and holds the push back if the site fails to build; git push --no-verify skips it.
npm run check Type-checks every part of the repository.

What is not in the repository

Images and video stay out of git. The pictures the portraits are drawn from, and the region maps cut from them, are kept locally. A fresh clone can read every line of the portraits' code but cannot rebuild them, and npm run site needs a built portrait. Collage's sculpture scans and their renders are kept locally too; each motif in collage/motifs.js names where its scan is published, and rendering one needs Blender. The Garden and the Footers build from the repository alone.

Layout

garden/      the Garden: plants drawn in code, and the site that grows them
footers/     the Footers component and its seven worlds
characters/  the field of letters and its page
collage/     the collage cards, their page, and the scripts that render and draw them
portraits/   the portrait pieces and the harness that builds them
assembly/    the crew of hands, its engine, and the page they build
flotsam/     the page not found: its water, its numerals and its sea floor
monoline/    the vase that keeps changing its flowers: pen, bottles, plants and palette
rain/        the figure in a rain of characters: bodies, umbrella, rain and palettes
glass/       the solid of glass over the page: its shader, its stage and what lies under it
site/        delineate's own page
tools/       the small static server the dev tools share
.agents/     the agent skills
.githooks/   the hook that publishes the site when main is pushed
AGENTS.md    how to work here: a worktree per piece of work, and what a push to main does

Assembly, Characters, Flotsam, Footers, Glass, Monoline, Rain and the site keep a notes.md beside their code with the rules a change must keep; garden/climates.md holds the gardens' botany.

License

MIT. Take what you like; keep the notice.

About

Drawings that move when you do: portraits, gardens and page footers drawn in code as SVG, each with a skill your AI agent can follow to make one like it.

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