GIBBING YOU MY HEART!

2026

Graphic Design / Pen Plotter / 3D

TOOLS USED
Gimp, Blender, Photoshop, Illustrator, Bantam Tools ArtFrame

OVERVIEW

If you’re Hallmark, you want your Valentine’s Day cards to look approachable and sweet.

I wanted mine to look explosive.

In GIBBING YOU MY HEART!, I created a set of machine-drawn Valentine’s Day card inspired by the explosive, low-poly gore of early first-person shooter games, such as Doom and Quake.

DIGITAL PROCESS

The word “gibbing” in the title is a reference to the term “gib,” coined by early Doom and Quake players. Possibly originating from the word “giblet,” players would use the word “gib” to refer to killing characters in one shot, which resulted in a explosion pixelized chunks of gore. Online servers were flooded with the new lingo: “get gibbed!”

Gameplay of Doom (1993), with “gibbing” effect

To recreate these “gibs ” for my design, I began in Gimp, a texture painting software commonly used to create retro image textures for 3D models. With some simple brush presets and the texture tiling feature, I was able to produce an infintely tileable image texture for my heart design.

Tileable blood texture made in Gimp

In the 3D modeling software Blender, I created a geometry nodes system that allowed me to generate and arrange slightly randomized polygonal blocks, which I then linked together in the shape of an exploding heart. Applying the image texture from Gimp to these polygonal blocks transformed the 3D model into the early FPS explosion of blood that I was looking for.

Geometry nodes system in Blender

Using the compositing effects in Blender—a mixture of outlining and posterization—I rendered the 3D heart as a flat, two-colored image which would serve as the basis for the card design.

Render with no compositing effects

Render with compositing effects

Timelapse of heart drawn with pen plotter

Adding a a explosive ray of lines to the heart in Illustrator was the final touch before preparing the card for drawing. In a custom p5.js program, I converted the image into an SVG file composed of dense, color-coded vertical lines, which can be drawn on on a pen plotter.

This method of “rendering” the image using densely-packed vertical lines mimics the original Doom (1993) engine, which rendered 3D environments by drawing walls as vertical columns of pixels.

Card design from Illustrator

SVG output of card design from p5.js program

PEN PLOTTER PROCESS

Pen plotting done with Bantam ArtFrame 1824 on Strathmore Mixed Media 5”x7” cards

FINAL PRODUCT

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