complexity

Another mandala. Personal maps of the moon. The black frame might be superfluous.

Been mining this particular vein (and writing about it here) for one year today. All in all, happy with progress. The thing that has me really excited, though, is knowing I still haven’t gotten remotely close to the end. Having a journey in front of me is more satisfying than arriving at a goal.

Here’s the first image in Ruby/SVG I did one year ago, and the most recent image:

doppel090.png, originally uploaded by michaellascarides.

Feel like a dope for not getting on this sooner, but I’ve created a Flickr account that I’ll be using to share works. I’m also posting a few to the Generator X group for generative art.

Also, I’ve started another blog on an unrelated topic that I am nonetheless equally passionate about: bicycle commuting.

Late-night trigonometry. Off the grids and into the spirals. Maps of the soul, military-spec mandalas. Now we’re getting somewhere.

Two changes today that made world of difference. First, each of the 14 different shapes types that are used in this drawing program are now ordered in some semblance of order, with straight lines on one end and circles on the other. This makes the transitions between shapes a little less jarring (which really helps with coherence, since there are now hundreds of thousands of individual shapes in each image). Second, I took the “baseline” and “ray” shapes (which are lines that zoom across the whole image surface) and made them uniformly thin hairlines. Previously, they had varied in thickness based on color density, but this usually just meant that they obliterated the rest of the image. Now, even images that are predominantly composed of these two manage to maintain a lightness throughout. Some fave results below (the two without finished edges are detail views):

Working on images for a portfolio, and have recently decided to find out what the absolute upper limits of my equipment are. The maximum seems to be this image: 55 megabytes of vector info, about 400,000 individual vectors, taking 25 minutes just to open in the browser. I can’t even print it because it chokes Illustrator (needs more ram). Once again worth noting: there are no gradients nor pixels in this image (will in the original, at least); each tonal shift is a collection of tiny sharp-edged marks, each of which is a single solid color.