In my ongoing creative journey through generative art, I have wanted to be inspired by forms of artistic expression I truly resonate with plus giving every collection a twist only code and computer art can provide. Finding ways to unite old with new in order to captivate the public attention and surprise them with a renewed visual language. This is a path I'm still walking and I try to stay as humble as I can, knowing my limitations with programming and code and my short time in this space; I feel I have so much to improve and art is always evolving in my head, so is my coding library, day by day. Let's develop this further.

For this collection, I was deeply inspired by Japanese art after visiting an exhibition with works by Ōtagaki Rengetsu, the famous 19th century budist monk poetess from Kyoto. The subtile, sober and elegant calligraphy plus the simplicity of the poems got deep into my inner self; talking about nature, seasons, bucolic life in order to speak about more transcendent reality. It's the way abstract art speaks, using simple and small things to talk about bigger ones in an intimate manner only artist and public know about.

Having this thoughts in mind, I wanted to give a twist to 'life is a (beautiful) mess' algorithm, using its plotter-like style lines to create more dense brushes. Although the style is recognizable and the code too, the algo was generated again from scratch to have more control over the features I wanted to tweak in each stroke. All lines work together in the new collection, but they have individual changes over the time and space; for example, depending on speed the weight of the stroke and the alpha change to give a more natural output.

First outputs I shared on twitter were just studies on different brushes made of dense group of lines, in a line, circle or square disposition. Finally I choose only two different types of brushes for the collection but I enjoyed this process of making a little brushes library of my own.

Meanwhile I was refining the tools/brushes for the project, I ended up trying different speed and sizes of brushes and lately I came with a composition I found suitable. Below you can see and early WIP of what it became the main composition. Wide dense brush comes down straight to provide a more vertical perception of a nearly square canvas (10:9). After this, I tried to cross another horizontal brush, it's a feature only seen in a few outputs but I came to love the contrast it gives.

Next step was to create a group of palettes suitable for the collection. Following the Japanese style, I used for inspiration "The dictionary of color combination" by Sanzo Wada and its coding tools created by Matt DesLauriers. I used palettes on the book in a free style, combining colors and making new fresh palettes. Some more elegant, as the cover image of the collection and output #11 shared previously, and some more colorful and funny, as the wip shared on twitter I show below.

Only one palette is monochrome, black on white or white on black, and for now, just output #29 (below) and 40 (cover article) have it, so it's the rarest. Also this feature has some other particularities, all brushes go free motion, the ratio size is 10:8 to give more vertical aesthetics (as it doesn't have a wide brush as background) and the number of brushes is higher, from 3 to 5. Also brushes have less alpha value and less lines so it gives the effect of a chalk or pencil drawing. I really like how it looks.

Another important aspect of this collection is that it was created to be printed and hanged at home. My wife and I decided this kind of artwork was perfect for our saloon, so I crafted it so the collector could spin and move the brushes to save some outputs that he really loved. You can try it: press left and right arrows or "c" to move or spin the brushes.

We already ordered some prints on outputs I made before the final collection, framed and hanged them on our place, as you can see in the pictures above; and in order to provide a high quality print service for collectors, I just published the collection on artfora.com so you can have yours too. ARTFORA is new platform to redeem physical objects pair with NFTs. It simplifies the print, shipping and certification of fine art prints. The prints are in Hahnemuhle German Etching paper that gives an amazing texture and sizes 12"x12" and 20"x20" are currently available. If you want to print a customized output from your piece, please get in contact with me first.

https://www.artfora.com/user/collections/autonomous-coded-paint-brushes

I hope you enjoy my art and this little behind the scenes article on my creative process. Just to say goodbye I share with you some new WIPs with different new coded brushes I have been studying...

See you soon! Love and code! ❤️