February 11, 2008 — Under the Canopy

My last sketchbook entry is from November of last year, which might lead some to think I haven't been creating any fractals. Not true. Some graduated from the sketchbook into the 2007 gallery, and others are still in the works. I've worked on this particularly stubborn, needy image quite a bit in the last, almost 3 months. Finally last night, I convinced it to let go of me and risk life on its own.

I began Under the Canopy on December 20, 2007. It's not at all unusual for me to end up in a decidedly different place (artistically, stylistically) than where I started, and I almost always save several versions that show potential along the way in case I want to go back and pursue one in a new tangent. This image, however, set a record for the number of saved tweaks. As you can easily see, the location of the original Julia spiral structure never changed, rotated, panned, or otherwise morphed, but the shapes placed on the spiral, and the textures and palettes I explored certainly did.

When you look at the progression in the video, you may wonder why I nixed some of the options; you may prefer some of the inbetweens to the one I'm calling the end result. When I'm in the middle of creating an image, I often get all excited about one particular area or effect and miss the elephant in the image – the muddy color transitions, or how the very cool purples pull the focus away from the delicacy of (the intended) the focal point.

I went through periods of more limited palettes and times when I got all wrapped up in the excitement of the discordant colors and lost a sense of subtlety. Other times, I became attached to very pastel versions and had to remind myself that a wider tonal distribution would probably add back some of the drama that was missing.

You will easily note the phase when I battled my recent obsession with rainbow palettes, and near the end, around 2:37-2:45, my last desperate attempts to introduce a bit more color and zing. Although I didn't set out with a plan for the image in the beginning, I began to develop one along the way and, in the end, I think I achieved what I was going for: a canopy of foliage framing a spiral of delicate and subtly-colored winged creatures. When, finally, the one-more-time-through-each-layer/gradient/control-point/merge-mode did not result in anything better, I could call the work complete.

But having saved so many options along the way, I thought it might be interesting to my friends and students at the Visual Arts Academy to see what the process for this image looked like. The video is fuzzy, but hopefully you'll get the idea. And the finished image is below for comparison.

[Use of Jonathan Coulton's "So Far So Good" by Creative Commons license. Go enjoy more of his fun music, including "Mandelbrot Set" on his website!]

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