Art doesn't start out finished
Sharing the process because the process is vital
I’m an artist and creative technologist. I write about generative art, code, creativity and other interconnected topics. You can expect a diary on Fridays sharing the things I’ve been working on. Thanks for joining me here. 💖
Hello!
This has been a fun week with deadlines out of the way! It’s HOT here in London which I love! I’m off for a couple of weeks from mid next week, but I’m planning to schedule next week’s newsletter ahead of time, so it’ll just be the one on the 4th July that’s missing.
Things I’ve done this week
Collaborative plotter painting experiments with acrylic
When I plot with watercolours, I program the brush to go over to the palette and pick up paint every few strokes. For acrylics, I’ve been trying a new technique.
I dot the paint directly on the paper and then have the brush go through it. To ensure I dot the paint in the right spots, I started plotting little guide marks that indicate where a brush stroke will begin.
You can watch a timelapse of the process here:
Substack | Instagram | YouTube | Tiktok
This video has around 27k views on TikTok. Getting lots of people to see my work is always nice (and kind of the whole point) but it also means I have to deal with comments!
I am committed to trying out ideas and to sharing the results of those experiments. I think some people enjoy and get value out of seeing the behind the scenes, and I enjoy documenting it, but I think some other people are expecting to see finished work only.
Here’s one comment that got me thinking about this:
I think I could probably make it clearer in the videos that these are explorations, not finished pieces, but actually it’s kind of nuts all round that we expect artists to produce perfected work only.
I don’t blame audiences for interpreting and judging shared work as “finished” because it makes sense to expect that something shared is complete. I just think celebration of the process should be encouraged!
Exploration and experimentation are how ideas develop. Fear of creating something imperfect or even “bad” is probably the number one creativity roadblock.
Trying stuff out is also how we learn.
There was actually one painting I made before the one in the video above, which was EVEN WORSE (lol).
In this one, I dotted the paint on freehand, in a grid I thought would somewhat match the layout of the brush strokes.
Right away, I learnt this wasn’t effective. Some dots of paint were untouched and some brush strokes didn’t have much paint. That immediately led me to the idea of plotting guidemarks first. I don’t think I would have had that idea if I’d just sat on my hands and thought about it.
Things have to be physically tried.
Another learning - I’d done the entire grid of dots before starting the plotted brush strokes.
That meant that some of the dots were drying by the time the brush reached them. The brush wasn’t able to move the paint that had dried at the edge of the dots, leaving these circles.
That led me to the piece in the video, where I first plotted guide marks:
And then dotted the paint as the plotter worked, to produce this:
I super enjoyed the collaborative feeling of making this with the plotter, and I like aspects of it, but it’s messier than I expected.
The lines are actually defined by Perlin noise but that’s much clearer on the digital version. (I don’t have the exact file this was plotted from, but it will have looked something like this.)
I think the painting reads as near-random smearing, so in the next version I wanted to show more obvious control over the brush strokes. I adjusted the Noise settings for more structure.
I liked the mechanical repetition of shapes here, but the variation in the structure on the right and bottom edges doesn’t quite work for me, and I don’t like the white space.
In the next one I wanted to fill more of the gaps, so I adjusted the code so that the paths respond to and avoid the other paths around them.
The digital version looks like this:
And the painting looks like this:
It’s still not what I want, but I know what I’m going to try next.
A Message Drifts writeup
This should be done before I go away, so you can catch it in next week’s newsletter. Here’s a little preview!
That’s all, thanks again for joining me!
I’ll leave you with this shot of a gradient that dried in the watercolour paint water tray, and I’ll see you here next week.
Amy ⭐
