I got this idea for a cool image operation from an image in the book “Conceptual Blockbusting”.  The seed image was basically just a bunch of sheared black and white rectangles.  I wanted to create a similar image from some source image, but have a bunch of colored rectangles.  I ended up using rotated and scaled rectangles.  The result wasn’t near as good as I had hoped, but I figured since I wasted a little bit of time on it, that it was worth sharing.  I tried adding edges as well.  Didn’t work out all that great but whatever.

Check out the source code.  It requires some code from a previous post on shock filtering, and it uses cairo to do the drawing (shear source code).