Art Diary: September and October 2022

This is the next instalment of my art diary series where I cover the various arty things that I’ve been up to. This has been a fairly quiet period for my art project as I’ve been focused on other things so everything here is something I’ve created for my instagram page.

Abstract Landscape Scenes

Usually my abstract art is very abstract, but recently I’ve been experimenting with creating images of real scenes with simple shapes and lines. My first attempt was inspired by the sign on a local pub which shows a ship sailing in front of a sunrise. The ship doesn’t look very realistic but this is my first ever attempt at this style of art.

For my second attempt I removed the ship and added some waves and a flock of birds. The waves are simple sine waves but they actually look ok. My plan for the next version is to add the ship back in but I want to study photos of real ships so I can make it more realistic.

Colour Gradients

My plan for these next pieces was to create a smooth colour gradient with some visual interest like a wave or a spiral. In this first attempt I created a spiral of points and coloured the rest of the image according to the nearest points of the spiral. It looks quite nice, but the effect wasn’t really what I was looking for. I’m trying to avoid the sharp transitions around the points of the spiral and I’d like the colours to be as vibrant as possible instead of looking fuzzy and murky.

This is one of my attempts to smooth out the transitions. It didn’t work as intended but I still liked the way it turned out.

After many attempts I was finally able to get the effect I was looking for and I’m very happy with the end result. The main downside is that I had to add lots of points to the central spiral which made the code run really slowly.

Fractal Flames

Fractal flames can produce some really stunning and complex pieces of art. I won’t explain them here, because frankly I don’t understand them enough to do so. This is one of my first attempts at understanding what they are and how to make them.

A feature of fractal flames is the way the colours reflect the shape of the fractal flame. I added a logarithmic transparency filter so that the dense parts of the fractal flame appear much clearer. Again I don’t fully understand this but this second version does appear to have clearer details and I think it looks much closer to what a fractal flame should look like.

Vector Fields

Vector fields are very important in many fields such as physics, mathematics and computer graphics. They can be also be very useful for digital artists. My first picture shows a two-dimensional vector field and to create it each point in the space is assigned a direction. For my art I need a fairly smooth vector field which means that nearby arrows point in similar directions. The end result looks like a surface covered in very short hair.

What makes vector fields interesting is watching them act on other things. Here I started with a regular grid of points and moved each one once following the directions of the vector field. This distorts the grid and creates something that looks like a scrunched up piece of paper.

I did something very similar for my next piece. Instead of one large movement I let the points flow around, following the directions of the vector field. Each line represents the route traced by one point from the original grid.

My favourite version of this effect is a piece I’m going to publish next month. I started with a series of concentric circles and then tracked the points as they flowed through the vector field.