Seedlings

"A young plant, especially one raised from a seed."

Each Seedling grows delicately on a windowsill gazing outside. A Seedling's natural environment–whether a grassy prairie, a rocky mountain, or by a river–is but a memory now, leaving a faded imprint on the canvas' outer border. Some Seedlings resemble trees and flowers, others may appear to be geometric abstractions and fractals–yet all feature interplay between filled patterned regions (leaves and petals) and lines of solid color (stems and branches). Other abstractions also make an appearance: circles representing fruits, stars, or the sun and moon; and a gradient sky with foggy clouds beyond the frames of the window.

Foundation

The idea for Seedlings was sown in 2019 and was my first foray into Generative Art. It began as a study of fractal trees where each depth level was individually parametrized (angle of rotation, length, etc.). Initially just a hobbyist project in the pre-Art Blocks era, I returned to Seedlings in 2022 to develop it into the longform series, I believe, that most effectively highlights the underlying algorithm's potential. So, I rewrote Seedlings from scratch, turning its simple monochromatic line renderer into a WebGL shader renderer capable of transforming Bézier curves into abstract stems, branches, leaves, and petals with diverse and colorful palettes.

Inspiration

Having lived much of my life in New York, one of the most urbanized cities in the world, I developed a significant appreciation for green spaces. The city's parks became a refuge from the urban sprawl–where one could touch some grass, breathe fresh air, and pretend they were somewhere else. In an attempt to fill more of my life with green, I placed some plants on my windowsill. The joy they bring my home inspired Seedlings.

Over the course of its development, Seedlings collected many stylistic influences, including Hokusai's trees, Charles Demuth's crisscrossing polygonal regions, and Alphonse Mucha's curves. As such, you will find elements of Ukiyo-e and Art Nouveau across the collection. Seedlings also contains stylistic elements found in my other work, such as ink-like outlining and the concept of shape overlap.

Additionally, I drew inspiration from contemporary longform Generative Art that aims to create complex emergent behaviors from the interactions of a small set of primitives. The structural patterns that form each Seedling are created purely from the probabilistic placement of their branches and petals.

Dedication

Seedlings has been a labor of love and has particular sentimental value to me as the inception of my Generative Art practice. It feels fitting and very exciting to be given the opportunity to release Seedlings on Art Blocks, the original longform Generative Art platform. Thank you to everyone who helped and supported me during this journey.

Seedlings is best displayed at larger sizes and at 4k resolution or above. I encourage you to open the outputs in fullscreen view to really appreciate their subtle details.

Since Seedlings makes extensive use of WebGL shaders, outputs may not render correctly at higher resolutions on machines with lower-end GPUs or those that do not support WebGL 2.

Press 'u' to increase the resolution scaling factor and 'j' to decrease the resolution scaling factor. The current resolution is printed to the browser console.