Craft & Fabrication Techniques

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Abstractions about hands-on techniques for shaping and decorating physical materials — casting methods such as lost-wax casting, cast paper, and type casting, mosaic and inlay work like opus vermiculatum and pietra dura, and print-related conventions including ink trap and typometry.

9 abstractions in this family — domain-specific abstractions that sit near one another in structural-signature space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Cast paper — A paper-forming technique in which wet fiber pulp is pressed or poured into a mold and dried into a relief or three-dimensional shape.
• Ink trap — Pre-distort vulnerable letterform junctions with deliberate notches so expected ink spread at small print sizes fills the removed area and restores, rather than closes, the intended contour.
• Lost-wax casting — A casting method in which a model is encased in a refractory mold, removed to leave a cavity, and replaced by molten material to reproduce the modeled form.
• Opus emplectum — A composite masonry technique using finished stone faces to contain a rubble-and-mortar wall core.
• Opus vermiculatum — An ancient mosaic technique using very small tesserae laid in flowing, worm-like courses around figures to create fine outlines, shading and pictorial detail.
• Pietra dura — A decorative hard-stone inlay technique that cuts, fits, polishes, and assembles colored stone pieces into pictorial or geometric designs on a supporting substrate.
• Pointillé — A decorative surface technique that creates patterns or texture through repeated punched or impressed dots without cutting continuous engraved lines.
• Type casting (typography) — The manufacture of reusable metal printing sorts by filling a mould containing a character matrix with type metal, producing repeatable bodies of standardized height and width.
• Typometry (printing) — Compose maps, diagrams, and other nontextual images for relief printing from reusable movable-type elements, rules, and modular symbols rather than engraving a unique continuous plate.