DAY 2/5 — DENIM
Texture of the Day:
Today’s texture is denim. According to my friend Jillian, denim means low-stress, easy, relaxed, well-worn, and casual. In order to start on this piece I decided to think about its motion: something slow, deliberate, and dream-like. After mulling over her adjectives, I decided to make a list of my own to compare. Denim, to me, needed to be thick, vaguely rough but even, cool to the touch, steady, and stable. The color palette needed to be cool and serene (blues and green), but also easy and casual (yellow). I sketched out some initial thoughts. At first, I was thinking I might have smaller, slow particles, floating just below a series of softly, bursting bubbles. My second sketch added a set of diagonal stripes to try and represent the stability, and structure of denim.
Below are my brainstorming notes:

My first attempt explored the lines I sketched out initially. In order to include some motion I decided to linearly cycle through the green and blue colored stripes.

What I ended up with felt too frenetic and totally lacked the serenity that I wanted this piece to have. Though the tone was totally off, the color palette seemed to be working! I decided to progress by playing around with some crosshatching and more stripe movement.

The diagonal movement and crosshatching still felt off, but I decided to push the motion further, which led me to…

I really liked the way this looked and though I kept playing around with it, I had to admit that it completely deviated from what denim meant to both me and Jillian. After all of the work I put into creating these lines I decided to mostly scrap the stripe idea and look at my original list of adjectives. I pivoted and decided to focus on the words comfort, easy, and well-worn to find my footing again.

I played with the randomization of the placement and width of the stripes, and ended up creating a painterly background. This felt like I was back on track! The soft look and movement felt like the perfect starting point, but still needed to be a little bit slower.

I ended up creating both rectangles and circles at randomized angles, sizes, and positions, and had them generate stacked on top of one another. This attempt still lacked the dreamy, lazy feeling that I wanted, so I decided to try to mess with filters in Processing to see what I could achieve.

By adding both a blur and dilation to the shapes as they generated, they ended up fading into the background working perfectly! The tone of the piece now felt both dreamy and relaxed, and the blur/dilation allowed the piece to feel worn in, too. The layering also managed to touch on a couple of the adjectives that described my take on denim: thick and even. The “melting” effect of the shapes, though rough at first, turned into an even mix of color. My last goal for this piece was to create some sense of stability, or at least predictability. I decided to try and re-introduce the grid pattern if possible.

My final piece! In order to avoid mimicking the texture of denim, I decided to break down the grid structure and generate it by depositing dots in rows and columns into the preexisting melted vat of shapes. This way the piece has a sense of rhythm and predictability, but not at the expense of the relaxed undertone. I feel that this piece especially benefited from my friend’s description. My initial reaction to denim felt a little cooler and less comfortable, but her interpretation ended up making more sense to me. This piece also really benefited from the first attempts that, though unsuccessful, helped me to understand my intention for the piece more clearly!

