More Chaikin experiments

In other posts I talked about the Chaikin algorithm, a beautiful piece of code to make really cool and interesting curved lines. I felt that there was much more to explore and learn from those curves so I kept working and experimenting with that. At first, I tried a more minimalist version of Color Mountains with simple pure Chaikin lines distorted with some incremental noise repeated on each line.

The result was really chaotic but I felt some kind of harmony from the repeated distortions. To try to make the image more readable I reduced the lines count and added a fill color inside each couple of lines to create full shapes.

Aesthetically the result was really cool to me, but it felt pretty limited so I decided to revisit the concept of repetition with additive shades.

After some trouble with my shapes drawing function not adding light alphas correctly, I managed to make it work. I used that function with concentric elliptical shapes to create the figure displayed in Shades 2. I found that composition fascinating since it could be seen in two-way:

• From top to bottom it gave me a sense of depth, like the feel when you look down a deep lake from the surface.

• From bottom to top it gave me a sense of height, like the feel when you look into a clear night sky full of stars.

Deep Stars

That mix of contrasting feeling hooked my interest and made me try to expand that concept more into the artwork. The next logical step was to add color.

My old canvas-like texture didn't really fit the mood of the artwork I was looking for, so I tried a bit more random and interesting texture. The final look was achieved with the generation of many random ellipses inside and outside the canvas.

At first, I tried to draw circles on random points of the main lines in order to create all the stars of the sky, the main conceptual sketch was something like these:

Which was then translated into a more refined style with the new texture, colors, and lines into the final series called "Deep Stars", which you can see all its pieces at full resolution down below.