Turning up the colors.

It is getting crowded. Many close to horizontal lines overlapping with vertical extensions.

Dialing up the number of lines…

I am struggling with this one. It is both too messy, and not messy enough. It looks better from a distance. I have the bright blue diagonal separating regions of orange/yellow and lighter colors. But up close the lines are too straight and the clean areas are too clean.

Normally I would just set this aside and maybe return to it later. But today I decided to post it anyway as a work in process.

The shading alternates above, then below, the lines.

See the notes for yesterday's picture Affine #6. I lack that restraint and had to keep adding lines.

There is a lot of potential here. Using just a few relatively short line segments, then varying the orientation and colors. I have several more that I consider experimental. They are not published now, but they convinces me that this is an idea worth exploring further in a future series. I am officially adding that to my "maybe someday" list.

This one colors on one side of a few short line segments. I like the very minimal look. But it takes remarkable restraint to not keep adding more lines.

The introduction to the multi-part sequence fractals series earlier this year had two similar images. Sequence Fractals Introduction #17, and Sequence Fractals Introduction #18.

The other pictures in the sequence fractal series had a non-linear component. Somewhere in the generating formula there was "z^a" with a != 1, usually a=2. Just for fun, I tried building some pictures without exponents in the formula. The results were interesting and I included those two in the introduction. But I never got back to the purely linear variety in the rest of that series.

So anyway, I am exploring similar ideas now in a slightly different context.

The images are generated by creating some number of affine transformations, usually between 20 and 100. Each will take the real axis to another line in the plane. The colors of the pixels near and above the lines are altered.

In mathematics an affine transformation looks like y = ax + b. You may recognize this from high school algebra as the formula for a line. Lines and affine transformations are closely related. Hint: affine transformations move lines to lines. See the Wikipedia article for details.

This will be a short series. I created these a couple of months ago in September. The first few came to me easily. Then I found it difficult to recapture the gloomy mood of these early ones. I intended to come back and do more work on the series, but that never happened. The "next big thing" is not ready yet, so I dropped in this shorter series now.

Of course there is no rule that I must publish the entire series consecutively and then never return to it. That is usually how it goes, but it is not a rule. So I may revisit these in the future.

These images use darker, somewhat depressing colors, and shapes that seem impersonal, even intimidating. I like the overall gloomy feel it presents.

To the amateur psychologists out there, this has nothing to do with my personal mood. There are plenty of things in the real world to make me happy, sad, hopeful, angry, disgusted. My personal mood may affect my energy, my desire, to create art, but it does not inform the art that I create.

Think of this image as a fiction. I enjoy these darker pieces in a way similar to a novelist delights in creating a dark and wicked villain.