While I have always been inclined towards minimalist design, creating a generative illustration with 100% code has been an idea I have had in the back of mind since I started learning generative art couple of years back. During a visit to my dad's hometown in Himachal Pradesh, India last year (image below), I was fascinated by how the shadows on the rocky Himalayan mountains were sharp and geometric. That was really the starting point for Lookouts.

There are number of illustrative artists that I appreciate and follow that turned to be a key inspiration when I started designing Lookouts. Below is the mood board of the art that I started off with. While each of these artists have a unique style, my main objective was to learn how they design compositions with the right amount of negative space and how well they use solid colors, and then apply those learnings to the kind of project I wanted to implement.

The most influential artists that formed this mood board were Kento Iida, Grant Yun, Priya Mistry, Louisa Kazig, Kristofer Haugvik & Hey Creative Studio.

Development Process

Given that the inspiration for the project started with mountains, that is exactly where I started for this project. I drew a lot of rough sketches (some of them below) & implemented a few of these in p5js. Shadows form a key part of all my 3 fxhash releases so far and this was not going to be different. I struggled to find the right balance between an output that was simple but also a realistic representation of the interplay between sun light and shadow on the mountain's surface.

While the illustrative mountain algorithm took it's time & was refined over time, I was also clear that I need to draw the foreground in mathematically correct perspective to provide depth within the landscape scene.

I learned how to draw in one-point and two-point perspective on paper by hand and then implemented those concepts in p5js to be able to draw objects that are seemingly 3D, but are drawn using math in a 2D plane. I now have a custom p5js library that I can leverage to draw multiple kind of objects in perspective. Below is one of the initial renders of 2-point perspective houses drawn in debug mode.

Scenes in Lookouts

From the start, I planned to have the mountains as the backdrop and different foreground scenes inspired by various lookouts that I had travelled to in regions near mountains. I started with the scene that has a house on a hilltop, that was followed by a lake view, and so on. I sketched, implemented, and iterated on several scenes, but there are 4 scenes that made the final cut.

Palettes in Lookouts

The palettes were potentially the toughest part to get going for me in this project. I made a conscious decision of not using any of the palettes that I have used in my previous fxhash projects or same palettes as some of the artists that inspired me. I wanted to curate palettes according to the scenes I was designing, rather than force-fit existing palettes to this project.

2 key sources of colors for me were the Palette Perfect book by Lauren Wager & Studio Yorktown's Color Town Hall. While the exact palettes did not fit with the scenes, a fair number of the palettes have been curated by combining colours from these 2 sources.

In all, there are 12 color palettes. While each palette works for each of the 4 scene types, there will be 22 out of the possible 48 scene-palette combinations in the final collection.

Optimised for printing

I recently purchased a printer for high-quality prints of my generative art & photographs, and that helped me optimise the design and color-combinations to support high-quality prints for the collectors. While I will not be providing prints directly at this stage, the project will support option to download in high resolution and I will also be enabling the print option on Tender. Below are some of results from the print testing of Lookouts.

That was a brief ‘Behind the Scenes’ of the collection. The final collection will have 99 editions, with the combination of different palettes and scenes leading to fair bit of variety. Hope you like it.

Happy Minting !