Hi all, sorry for the super-late example post. Based on what’s been posted already though, it seems like you guys have the hang of things 🙂

When going through the suggested inspirations, one artist in particular stood out to me – Zanis Waldheims. I loved his artworks which featured series of similar shapes with simple gradients, and found them incredibly soothing to look at. I set out to create a similar series of shapes with a gentle gradient.

I chose circles because I enjoyed the soft edge and felt it aided the gentle, playful sort of look I was going for. Unfortunately, at the time of writing this I was new to Max, so I didn’t know a way to “print” several of the same shape in different locations. This means that I had to have a separate “sphere” object for each circle in the series I made. This resulted in a rather long Max Patch —

30 circles/spheres in total, which I used to make three series. I gave each series two different colors through which they would transverse. I explored the relationships between purple and blue for the top series,  yellow and red for the middle series, and turquoise and green for the bottom series. This was achieved by allowing each series to manipulate two out of the three inputs for the “Color” command (R G B), with the top layer controlling “G” and “B”, the middle controlling “R” and “B”, and the last controlling “R” and “G”.

I believe my project is reminiscent of layered fish or dragon scales, with how the layers of the series interact. To make the project interactive, I decided to allow the onlooker to change  the final “Color” input which I had previously kept untouched. What this does in essence is desaturate the primary color the series takes on. For example:

Above is the project at 50% primary color desaturation, and

here’s the project at 100% primary desaturation.

The buttons used to change between these states are shown below:

There is also a button to have the artwork itself move between different points of desaturation, independent to each series. If I can get my video capture to work, I will add a video of the series in this form!

I hope you enjoyed!

Inspiration: