Bleeding

Here is an image made with one of my preferred color sets.

I often find myself writing the obvious in these descriptions. At that point it is better to stop talking and let the pictures speak for themselves. A title like "blue and brown shades on a bumpy wavy surface" is useful if one is building an inventory of the art. But not too useful when the picture is right there.

There is no overarching story for this set. I ran out of planned posts and had nothing in the queue. I am excited about where this is headed, this theme clearly has a lot of potential. I am in a stage of experimentation and discovery. In this case my motivation was exactly to try blue / brown colors on a bumpy wavy surface.

So, please indulge these obvious compositional descriptions for the next couple of weeks, as that is all there is.

Now with a black and white color scheme. The logical process would be to create some of these gray scale images first to get a feel for the scale of the color layer, before applying colors. Colors have their own personality. I tend to get lost tweaking colors.

Anyway, after creating yesterday's picture, I decided to remove colors and use monochrome images to get a feel for the relative scale the elements in the composition. This is one of those.

A intermediate color layer is added to the theme. The color pattern has a scale midway between the scales of the surface bumps and the larger slow horizontal waves.

Lately, I have been planning out a complete set of images before publishing the first one. Then scheduling them for one a day. There have been times in the past when I started on something, and then midway through changed direction. It is not a big deal, but I like to create the illusion that I am more organized than that.

These are work in process. I am not certain where this collection is headed.

Today's image follows the theme set out in yesterday's post. This one adds depth. It looks like someone did a poor job applying stucco to a wall.

Here is stripped down version of the theme for the next set of posts.

As with the last set, there is a random pattern. But instead of uniformly filling the whole screen, the pattern is limited to a horizontal wave shape, suggestive of a banner in the wind, or an unsteady brush stroke.

Within the wave, the density of the internal pattern is varies along horizontal wavy lines.

I started reading a book about light in art. I am only a couple of chapters in, but it motivated me to try some experiments.

The next two combine two patterns in different ways.

Third one. This one with hot colors.

Expanding the background and dimming the foreground.

This is a very small step closer to the elusive target I have been chasing. Two of these simple patterns are combined. The two patterns are different, but not too different. In the case the shapes are similar, scale is different and colors are complementary.

Continuing with yesterday's motif. Different color, rotated slightly, with a strong horizontal / vertical, orthogonal bias.

I have been saying that I find it more difficult to start with a specific intent than with a general or open intent. It seems obvious, after writing the words, the latter should be easier, it is shooting at a bigger target.

There is more to it than that. There is a compounding effect. When I try and fail when shooting for a specific target, what I feel is mainly failure. It is not instantaneous. The first try fails, I see what is missing, or needs improvement, it is just an expected step in the development process. But each step starts to feel like failure and that drains my energy and desired to continue.

On the other hand, with an open intent, there are still a lot of failures. But quite often the failure points to one or more new paths to explore. "That is unexpected, but I can work with it." This builds energy and gets the creative juices flowing.

When I have something specific in mind that I want to create. I can get close, but then cannot quite get over the finish line. Now, usually that almost-there result is good, but it is not exactly what I had in mind. I put in a lot of effort to get the last little bit, fail to do so, and then quit in frustration.

To be clear, this is not the only way, or even the typical way, to create something. Most often, there is a less specific final goal. I want this feature, and maybe these colors and this rough layout. The other details in my mental picture are less specific. Often just placeholders to be decided later.

Today's picture, as with almost all in this series, is an example of the alternate development process.

It has been several days since the last blog post.

I have something specific that I have been struggling to create. I decided to write in this blog about those struggles, and found it difficult to describe what I was trying to create. Perhaps that indicates that my specific intent is not very well defined after all, which could explain why the implementation is difficult.

Perhaps I will write more on this not-very-specific thing later. Let's fast forward a few days. Somewhere in the process I decided I needed to extract a background or secondary feature in the "big idea", and work on it separately.

So, here is a fuzzy random background pattern.