I'm not good with words. I don't like to use a lot of them. I prefer to be by myself - in solitude. I dream of a place where I can just sit and look at the beauty of nature for hours on end without being interrupted by the regular workings of life.

Some of my favorite memories as a kid (that is, that long-ago once-up-a-time before I had responsibilities) are sitting in the left back seat of my parent's car for long, long periods of time, and the only thing to do was stare out the window at the ever-changing landscape. That and smell the foreign air. We would drive from our brown and dry corner of Wyoming through Nebraska (also brown and dry and smelling of cow dung) and arrive at the promised land of Iowa with the infinite corn fields, rolling hills, trees, fireflies, and clean, fresh farmland air.

As an adult, I long for such freedom of mind and time to just stare at nature and beauty - to be completely in the moment with no care in the world beyond feeling the beauty around me.

Every so often, a piece of art I see can take me there.

I have one such print hanging in my bedroom - an abstract seascape that is soooooo colorful I can't help but feel both at peace and excited by looking at it. I don't know who the artist is. I picked it up at a local furniture shop for about $60. But I have been looking at it for years and dreaming that someday I could make something as good. I'm not there yet.

When I sat down to make a new art piece recently, I wanted to give 'abstract landscape' a try. I wanted it to be colorful and simple but pull me in to stare at for a long time - to escape into.

Here is how I did it.

How it was made

I started my code by choosing a random color pallet from a set of all possible colors (there are 45 possible colors). Each piece can have between 3 and 7 colors in its palette. (The sun might have a separate color altogether, but that's a different story.)

I then specified a horizon line. I decided the horizon should be at a random level vertically but within 30% and 60% of the height of the piece. The code chooses a random color from the palette and drops a rectangle from the horizon to the bottom of the piece. (I added a border to the image so you can see it.)

Since I knew I wanted the piece to be colorful, I figured the land was the best place to put the colors in. I made the code literally throw around random ellipses within the land area with random colors. The height of the ellipses becomes smaller the closer to the horizon they are to add in just a hint of perspective.

I like to see my art as a finished piece from the beginning. I don't like looking at a bunch of random ellipses. It feels.... um... naked. So before I went any further, I added my secret shader sauce so I could view the image as I intended it to look in the end.

First, it warps the image a little bit.

Then it blurs the image in such a way that every pixel has a different amount of blur as specified by a blur map. Here is the blur map (but with levels adjusted so you can see it because it is really faint). So pixels with a lighter color in the blur map get more blur, and pixels with darker colors get less blur.

After blurring, the image looks like this:

Finally, the shader adds in a cream tint and a texture on top with the multiply blending mode.

Next, I wanted clouds. The code chooses random creamy-tan colors and drops in semi-transparent clouds (ellipses!!!) in the sky. I quickly realized that the whole composition might come together more if I put the creamy tan colors over the land as well, so I just let the random ellipses go everywhere for this layer.

I then added a bunch of really thin colored ellipses again right on the horizon just to make sure that the horizon was clear and had enough definition after adding the clouds.

Trees. The trees are literally (between 1 and 20) triangles randomly placed on the ground area. They get smaller the farther back they are.

Next, I added the sun. It is a simple circle (and simple lines radiating outward if it has rays). But I went back and added it to the top of the code so that it appears under the ground area and under the clouds. The sun color (for a sun without rays) is any random color from the palette for the piece. However, for a sun with rays, I gave the code a set of less-intrusive colors to choose from. In this particular piece, since there are rays, the color came from that set of less-intrusive colors.

I struggled at this point with the concept of variation. I LOVED the piece just as it was, but I felt pressure to add variation. Nothing I added seemed to help or seemed right, though, so in the end, I chose to leave the piece the way it was and release it with a small number of editions (100).

I am honestly really proud of this project. I feel like I emotionally connect with it more than any other I have ever made. And I CAN get lost staring at the images for a very long time. My favorite part is the colorful wavy ground area. The way the colors mix and wave around together makes me swoon. Also, I absolutely love the pieces with red - especially a red sun.

I don't think I'm done exploring the concept of abstract landscapes. I am sure I will do more someday. But I feel I can get a print of one of these, hang it on my wall, and feel proud. I don't feel like it looks like it was made with code. It was made with love and emotion..... and code.