Happy New Year!
It has been quite some time, and certainly longer than my stated aim of two weeks, since I presented a novel piece of generative art. The enjoyable reasons for the delay are partly because it was family holiday season, and partly because my attention was diverted completing Advent of Code puzzles! However I’m now pleased to release the sixth piece in my Generative Art Practice series, called Ammonite.
In previous posts I have discussed the seed of an idea for each work, that is, the seed from which the process of iterating toward a finished piece of art starts. Looking back, that seed has often been something quite basic. I have also noticed that the seed can also be categorised at two ends of a spectrum: a concrete shape or pattern; or an abstract process or theme. Here are the seeds of the art series so far:
- Crimson Sun: a sunflower (concrete)
- Quad Crystals: quadrilaterals radiating from the centre (concrete)
- Square Wave: Douglas Hofstadter’s parquet deformations (abstract)
- Nett: flocking behaviour of birds (abstract)
- Weave: mouse behaviour, moving and turning repeatedly (abstract)
- Ammonite: seeing a beautiful brass ammonite in a London library (concrete)
Back to Ammonite, this was indeed born quite simply from seeing a brass recreation of an Ammonite, the beautiful extinct spiral creature, whilst reading in a library. Interestingly, this is the first work in my series whose name has stayed the same from start to finish. In all other cases, the emergence of a new form quite removed from the original seed has given rise to a deserved change in name.
Keeping up with a two-week cadence takes quite a bit of effort (there are cries of “I told you so!” from various quarters) however I find that a two-week cadence suits me well to keep up inertia. So to keep things more manageable, I will start to chunk sets of art into series to allow me to keep up the two-week cadence for a while then take a break. It also makes sense from the point of view of categorising the artwork rather than delivering an infinite stream of noise. To this end, Ammonite is the last of Series 1, giving me time to think about how I will approach Series 2. I would therefore like to take the opportunity to summarise what I’ve learned from Series 1, some of which I’ve mentioned already, some of which I’m only mentioning for the first time here:
- The seed of an idea doesn’t have to be complex or well formed. Start with something basic and see where it takes you.
- Iterate, iterate, iterate. And when something unexpected and interesting emerges, go with the flow.
- Randomness is key to creating novel and interesting outcomes, but I have found it best not to play heavily with it too early. I have made better progress by developing the basic structure into something interesting first, and then starting to play more with randomness in tandem.
- Similarly, colour (and sometimes lack of it) is an incredibly important aspect. In some cases it might be the most important aspect, however I have found that it is easy to get sidetracked and head down a blind alley by playing too early with colour. Again, I have made better progress by working on the basic structure for a while first before starting to play heavily with colour in tandem.
- If artwork were like cooking, then the main ingredients are: form, colour, randomness. And there is a host of seasonings that can transform a dish, such as:
- Line thickness
- Applying alpha to colour
- Rounding sharp corners
- Forming polygons where there are currently dots or lines
- Deciding when and when not to fill polygons
Code used to create all artwork in the Generative Art Practice series can be found in this Github repository.