For this assignment, I took inspiration from Thomas Downing’s Dots. What drew me to it was the simplicity of only using circles, as well as the use of radial symmetry in many of the paintings.

While using radial symmetry in the positioning and sizes of my spheres, I chose a different route when it came to color. I had already decided that I wanted my work to primarily be based from three primary branches; something else that has three primary branches is color. As such, I made each branch one of the primary colors of light (red, green, and blue). Feeling that this wasn’t enough, I added an extra sphere between each branch to represent the secondary colors of light between the primary colors.

The two variants that I made mostly revolved around the use of color. For the first variant, I removed the color, leaving the result a monochromatic rendition of the original. The second variant I made as an inverse to the original; instead of using the primary colors of light, I used the primary colors of pigment (cyan, yellow, magenta), with the in-between spheres being the secondary colors of pigment. To further push the idea of it being an inverse of the original, I re-positioned all of the spheres so that the overall shape appears inverted.

The patch is, inherently, a mess of connections. I had initially made new spheres for each variant but learned quickly that they don’t easily toggle on and off. Instead, I only made the 10 spheres that each variant shared. The top three buttons control the configuration of the spheres, setting the color, scale, and position of each one.

Inspiration: