DAY 4/5 — VELVET
Today’s texture is velvet! My friend Jon told me that he spent his day napping, sitting, and reading. To him velvet represented the negative emotions he felt surrounding the laziness of the day; Velvet is too soft and unstructured (like his day). This texture held the weight of the guilt from the day, but to me, velvet feels glamorous, luxurious, warm, and rich. Tackling this particular disconnect was exciting but also definitely a challenge!

I decided to start with the guilt associated with the kind of hedonism of lounging around and sleeping. My initial sketch created a buzzing circle that felt vibrant and warm, but overtime is “chased” by dots that represent the guilt. My sketch depicted the war ongoing within the piece between these two entities. The colors I chose also reflected a luxurious, rich color palette (hedonism) vs a cool, muted one (guilt).

I started off by experimenting with a grid that reacted to my mouseX and mouseY position. Though I toyed with creating an interactive grid I determined that it made more sense to create something that unfolded by itself . I decided to progress by starting from the sketch I had made initially.

My first attempt created a the hedonistic part of the sketch (the red and purple) that randomly generated points on the canvas that it would progress towards and then select a new point to move towards. I also generated a grid representing the guilt element of my piece that also “chased” the hedonistic part. This proved to be fairly challenging at first because it required thinking edge cases in a way I haven’t with previous pieces. It was exciting to push this piece into territory that felt a little newer and more advanced. I decided to further differentiate the red/purple vs blue elements of the piece.

In order to do so I played with my trusty DILATE and BLUR filter that I had relied on so much for the previous pieces. Because this piece felt like it was heading in a different direction, I vowed to stay away from those and achieve the effect I wanted without those filters. I did a little bit of research into shaders too but ultimately decided I didn’t have the time to dive in too deeply.

I ended up creating some interesting meta-textures (textures within the texture?) that felt interesting. Both the guilt and hedonistic paths felt a bit too soft, which I wanted to avoid. Though I did like the way these two textures looked together, I decided that the guilt path needed to be harsher and feel more predatory (as it seemed to feel for my friend Jon). I also transformed the hedonistic path from circles to randomized polygons.

Attempt 4 ended up creating quite a few changes. I changed the background to black, which helped the richness of the colors stand out, and also limited the “guilt” to one blue. Instead of using ellipses, I also decided to use lines that transformed depending on their relationship to the hedonistic path. This felt achieved the harshness that I wanted but also allowed this path to maintain a sense of stealth, something I didn’t realize I needed until now. Though Jon was upset about the way his day transpired, he continued to pursue napping and lounging despite his feelings of guilt.

I played with the severity of the guilt path by ramping up the space it took over and the patterns it wove into the canvas. Though I liked this effect, it felt overwhelming and was deviating a little too far away from the initial concept.

After feeling a little frustrated with this piece I stepped away from a few hours. After returning to it I realized that I wanted the hedonistic path to almost feel like it was “fluffing” the velvet texture (in the way that velvet slightly changes colors when rubbed). By changing the background color to red I was able to achieve this effect. Something still felt empty about this piece, though, and I couldn’t quite place my finger on it.

(NOTE: This gif is sped up in order to stay under the 25mb limit) Finally, I added a darker set of circles that created a bit of depth in the background and felt that the piece was complete! Overall I was confused initially with the choice that my friend had made, but instead of really focusing on velvet as a texture I focused on his feelings and tried to integrate my interpretation of the texture later. This strategy seemed to prove successful!
