Like the weather – Rain portrays many moods, feelings and emotions, it can be dark and foreboding, it can be spring like and hopeful, it can be calm or blustery, it can be a refraction of colour, like a rainbow. This work aims to stretch across those emotions.

The sketch that is now rain started work back in early October, as an attempt to create something that looks like a digital painting. Prior to this I had started this abandoned sketch looking at creating a smoky/skylike texture.

I took that overlaid shapes idea to create paint-like texture and applied it to squares mapped onto Bezier curves. Each with a very low opacity, which when layered, rotated, and flowing along naturalistic curves creates the smoky, paint-like backdrop texture for the work.

This gave the following first output, with a singular ‘drop’ of rain, and a rain like noise over the top.

It sat looking a lot like this for some time as I went down the ‘day of the dog’ rabbit hole and worked on some other projects.

I returned to it inspired by the cover of the Peter Gabriel Album ‘UP’ – which features 'frozen in time' water droplets over an out-of-focus image of Peter Gabriel, My initial sketch reminded me of this.

But I am not going down a photo-realistic route, instead, I wanted to recreate the shapes and light of the water droplets in an abstract form. This led me to create an organic shape that has a shifting outline. This evokes the shifting ripple of a water droplet where the light hits the edges, without being a faithful depiction.

In order to create a focal shift through the water, the image below has its pixel colour values altered to generate that prism effect, again in feeling, not reality mimicking. I was now really beginning to enjoy the piece and added more ways to show the water as a field of droplets rather than just one, and overlaying refracted, shattered grids to play with the concept of light refracting.

The colour pallets are a mix of some of my standard pallets – which are based on nature and Harris tweed, along with some new pallets based on street art. Along with a purely red and blue pallet (with one rogue yellow). The pallets are of course starting points as the overlays and inversions and pixel manipulation create many new colours.

I reintroduced the pattern over the top for some, evoking rain streaking down a window pane. This collection of abstractions create something entirely new, founded in nature and the energy of water, but truly digital compositions that the viewer may see their own story in the rain.

Lastly while testing I added in a loader – this was a little bit of a pain to refactor the drawing code to work in multiple passes rather than one go – but was required for the versions that have a grid of rain on – it was taking too long to render in the higher resolution. It does enable the ability to see it drawing in stages – but I have disabled that as I feel it ruins the magic. I also love the loader!!

The piece has been released as part of the #fxhashturnsone celebration, with 20% to Processing Foundation and 20% to Save Pakistan.

Acid Rain

I also dropped 'Acid Rain', a companion piece to Rain. A fully Animated work. It features the cross-cutting algorithm used in Rain, but instead of using it to alter the colours, it's filled with a 'god ray' pattern in alternating pallets. Then the Acid rain falls down obliterating all it touches. There's a touch of Banksy to that as well as the obvious environmental elements.

This is 100% sales to 4 charities.

some outputs from development