My newest series of prints originated from a coding bug from my last Pick-up Sticks Series. You can read more about the original series and inspiration here.
As I was developing the Pick-up Sticks Series, I was writing the code to determine how many sets of sticks I wanted to draw. In the code, given a set of 10 colors, a function drawLines() draws one stick for each of the chosen colors in turn. In order to call this function multiple times, I wrote the following code:
Array.from({ length: 10 }, () => { drawLines(colorSet); });
The number 10 must have been on my mind due to the color set length, and when I ran the code, instead of the set of 40 lines that I had intended to be drawn, the canvas was much more saturated, because it drew 100 lines:
I was showing this happy accident to my husband, and he thought it looked awesome and suggested I push it further. I ran a few more tests, including testing adding back in the lighter colors that I had previously filtered out for the Pick-up Sticks Series, since now you could actually see them show up when layered on top of the darker colors as opposed to the white canvas.
Here is the test I did before adding the lighter colors back into the mix:
Because of the lack of variety in color saturation, there is not a ton of contrast in this image. The best way to describe color saturation is the level of intensity of a color. Bright colors have high saturation, and because I had previously filtered out many of the brighter colors, there is a lack of contrast in this image, so I added the lighter colors back in:
I thought the composition this created was much more interesting with the added contrast of the lighter colors.
Compared with the previous series, I find these to be much more chaotic and they look like a zoomed in picture of a wild, multicolored haystack. I also like how the image is so saturated, that barely any of the white background shows through. Finally, many, but not all, of the prints in this series tend to have a dominant color, so from farther away the prints will read more of one color, but then you can see the many colors when looking up close.
I recently received this comment about my work: “Your pieces remind me of the way abstract art communicates an emotion through color theory.” I love this comment and I think it definitely applies to this series.
One of the coolest parts about creating art with code is the ability to significantly increase the number of things with a simple code change. If I were drawing this by hand, going from drawing 40 sticks to drawing 100, or even 1000, sticks would take more than twice the effort, but in code I can quickly iterate by changing numbers. The ability to experiment so easily is one thing I’ve found I love while using automation in the creation process.
Here is the first print in the series:
Like my previous series, there are only 20 prints available and each one is completely unique. I hope you enjoy these. Please let me know what you think and if you’d like to see more experiments using high numbers!