More blended color bands.

I was working on tools or techniques. I draw a single fuzzy wavy line, not as the finished product, but as a prototype to study. How can I vary it? Size, color, waviness. How can this be used alone or with other tools to produce a finished piece?

Inevitably the prototype and experimentation lead to something that I want to finish and publish. Often those get lost because I am in 'tool' mode, and do not want to get distracted. They get set aside with the intention to revisit later, and later never comes.

Lately I have made it a policy when I get an interesting prototype to set aside tool development and try to develop a finished piece. Sometimes I can create something that is unique and interesting enough to be worthy of publication. Sometimes it is just a dead end.

To be clear, these are finished pieces, not mere experiments. I may not have started the day with the intention to end up here. Often you cannot plan creativity or inspiration.

Starting a new series, "Workshop". This is catch-all series. Nothing is really planned, there is no particular order. It is best summarized as "what I have been working on lately"

Here I overlay bands of color. The bands are mostly distorted sine waves. They are fuzzy on the edges to blend in with surrounding features.

Someday, I may reclassify these as part of a series. Or maybe not, and this is it, just a bucket of one-off items.

What? You decide.

Here the focus is provided by the illusion of a singularity or event horizon in the upper right.

Similar to Monochrome #13. Less density and the spiral is off-center.

No more words from me. If you have been following along you can add your own. I feel that I am either repeating myself or just stating the obvious at this point.

A spiral in the center.

I tried to move the spiral center off the canvas center, but that did not seem to add interest. So this time I stayed with my initial dead-center instinct.

Continuing with the variations. This time many of the dots are stretched along elongated sine waves, and everything is tilted about 30 degrees.

Normally I do not like the wall paper type of repetition. I think it is palatable here. It provides a pattern that is easily grasped.

More not-really-random dots. Variable sizes, and some are stretched.

The number of different sizes are limited. The stretching is limited to the orthogonal directions. The larger sized items are more rare.

Initially the image seems rather busy. The additions generate more interest than just same sized dots. By limiting the addition to just a few patterns, there is a competing simplicity.

I made several of these, with various feature rules. More or fewer sizes, more or fewer orientations. I like this one the best. I also find it depends on my mood. Sometimes I like the simpler ones, sometime the more chaotic ones.

Another random/not-random array of dots, similar to the previous post.

Consecutive dots, whether horizontal, vertical or diagonal seems to be the key ingredient. These lines are about the only thing that works. If I try to build, for instance, a section of a circle, or alternating dot/no-dot, it takes too much space and the image immediately jumps firmly to the not-random side of the ledger.

This one gets close to the random/not-random boundary.

There are several places with four or five consecutive dots. There is one place with seven dots on a diagonal. You would not expect this from a collection of random dots at this approximately 20% density.

That does not mean that there is a pattern. It is fun to try to discover a pattern. You start to see a pattern, and then it fades away.

As mentioned in Monochrome #1, many of these images arose from a now abandoned order and chaos series. As part of that series I asked what would happen if some dots were removed from a regular grid. What does the boundary between order and chaos look like. Or, in this case the boundary between random and not-random.

In this one you may notice symmetry from a flip across the lower left / upper right diagonal. The other diagonal teases at a similar mirror symmetry, but it is not there.

You may also see hyperbolic (Hyperbola) curves in the upper right and lower left quadrants. That is by design. So this one is not-random, although it is clearly closer to the random/not-random boundary than an obvious wall-paper type pattern of dots.

Lonely, Isolated.

This is Monochrome #3, with the fuzzy white dot either smaller or farther away.

I never tried using this as a template for finished art work. Maybe someday. There are some pieces where the main central figure is small. For example Bugs #6, and Bugs #12. But the surrounding space is not empty. The little figure is supported by the thin designs in the background. Bugs #9 has a mostly empty background, but the little bit of background design still supports, lifts up, and frames the small central figure.

It is not that I have a policy against creating art that evokes feelings of loneliness or isolation. Rather there is a compulsion to fill up the empty space, and as a result nothing is ever lonely.

Negative of yesterday's post Monochrome #5.

You might think this was inspired by a Soundgarden song (youtube). But it is nothing so deep. It is just a mechanical transformation of the previous piece.

Warm, Protective.

Yesterday, I was investigating putting the bright spot slightly off-center, Monochrome #4. At the time, I did not think about possible differences due to the direction of the offset. I mentioned that in passing, and was going to leave it there. But leaving it as a passing comment seemed incomplete. So I had to go back and create today's picture.

This one is basically yesterday's post mirrored across the horizontal center line.

The image suggests a sun in the sky, which probably accounts for my initial reaction.

Mischievous, Roguish. A child that will not stay still for a photograph.

Again, this is an experiment. What do I feel, first impressions, when I see this? Why? How does this translate to more complex pieces?

The image is trying to move the focus off center. The single fuzzy white dot is shifted down and to the right compared to Monochrome 3. Same clean shape, but it not, as if it refuses to be, where you expect it. Staying in the center is too expected, too symmetric.

When I am working on something and notice that main point of interest is in the center, I immediately feel compelled to change that; I cannot consciously do the normal or expected thing. So I shift the view slightly. The viewer experiences a subconscious search and then discovery to find the central feature. Just a playful tease.

Most of the time I shift the main feature to the right and down. I do not know why I favor that direction. I am not sure what different directions mean. Perhaps a shift lower is something that is grounded. Whereas a shift up suggests rising or falling.

Friendly, Confident, Bold. Although sometimes Menacing, Invasive. The latter when it reminds me of a Dalek's lens.

I have many pictures of these fuzzy white dots on my hard drive. I have grown quite fond of them. I created them more as an experiment than as finished work. I see them as an abstraction or template for art. (Abstraction in the general and original artistic sense.)

I led with some possible emotional reactions to this image. Now a technical examination. The viewer's attention is drawn to the center. The focal point is the exact center of the canvas. Focus or interest wanders towards the edges, then snaps back to the center.

Center focus is the default when I am creating much more complex pieces. If I am thinking about things other than the viewer's center of focus, it inevitably ends up at the center of the canvas. The feature I find most interesting is placed dead center, smaller supporting features surround and support it, fading out to the edges. Most things are designed this way. It is not creative, it is just the default.

For this image the colors in Monochrome #1 are reversed. Are these fuzzy black dots, or holes? They pop in and out like an optical illusion. The intent is not to create an optical illusion. Rather the intent is to explore the emotional response compared to the black on white version.

I do not mean an obvious emotion like you might experience with a painting or photograph of a child with a puppy. Rather something more like meditation. If you try to remove your expectations and quiet the inner narrative, what do you feel? Personally, what I find is not symmetric as might be expected with the mechanical color flip would suggest.

I was planning a series on the somewhat cliche subject of order and chaos. The thesis being that the most interesting art is on the border between the two, while either extreme is uninteresting. A blank canvas is the most extreme example of order.

What is an example of boring order that is a small step above an empty canvas? To find that I decided to remove all color, and all sharp contrasting edges and transitions. Perhaps the simplest 2D geometric figure is the circle. So, fuzzy circles must be the answer.

Well, it turns out that even fuzzy black and white circles are interesting. Perhaps it is the simplicity itself that makes it interesting. Perhaps it is the irony of setting out do create something uninteresting that makes it interesting. It is surprising and fascinating. It gives me motivation to put the order and chaos project on the back-burner, and to set aside the brightly colored and twisty fractals for a short time to explore the world of fuzzy white dots.

Nerdtalk: a = 2, center = (-1.55, 0.33). Formula information can be found in earlier post Bugs_#14. cos() is used instead of sin(), but the results are similar.

Solipsism: Yep, still talking to myself. Unique non-bot page hits have dropped back down to between five and ten a day. No one is leaving comments. I kept up the one-post-a-day pace for over 100 posts, but I have slowed down in the last two weeks. I am going to take a break for a little while. No not for a decade like last time, just for a few weeks.

I still have ten or so finished images to post in the bugs series, I will get those posted, slowly, not daily. I also need to generate a gallery page for the series. So the blog will not be entirely quiet.

It is not that I am burnt out, just the opposite actually. I have been working on my program. Not in the art algorithm / generative aspects, but more in the fundamentals. There are always bugs to fix, and tests to write to keep the bugs out. The fun part is that I am adding a layer to help with organizing my recipes/formulas. The program now (well soon) will track and categorize images/recipes by those that have been published, are queued to be published, need little tweaks before sharing, ideas for a new series, etc. I will be able to select formulas, palettes and similar things by clicking a representative image, rather than remembering the name.

I want to make changes to the site as well. Wordpress has been great for getting me started again. Back in the day, the site was all static html files. That was a really energy drain when I wanted to post something new. But Wordpress has its own kind of energy / productivity drag. The Wordpress web interface dashboard is great for non-programmers. But it quickly becomes too much clicking and form-filling-in for me. The default gallery sucks. There are numerous third party plug-in galleries, but none do want I want. You get the idea, I will stop whining about why I want to make changes.

I envision a day when a button in my art program will automatically generate the image at multiple resolutions (thumb, mobile, gallery, full), ftp them to the web site, give them reasonable and trackable automatic names, add to a gallery page, and generate html for a notes and comments page.

So, the bottom line is, my posts will slow down while I am working on these background tasks.

Picture Post. Minimal nerd talk.

a = 1.3, viewport center = -0.4156 + 1.0436i. Formula information at Bugs #14.