Looking back at 2012, what were my artistic highlights?
It began revisiting a couple of my original styles from 2011, gnarled glynnias and their close cousins I dubbed geologicals
Then I hit on another original combination: the flux-glynnia. Rocky in texture and somehow inherently disturbing, the space offered felt limited, like a single underground cavern system, the abode of pure evil.
A relief, then, to move onto the amazing patterns of linked edisc/julians, looking like some deep Mandelbrot zoom.
Then a brief flirtation with linked splits/elliptic to create spiral forms.
Before the mid-year release of Michael Faber’s e-series plugins, linking back nicely to those edisc/julians.
Then the usual mid-to-late summer doldrums before the final quarter, heavily dominated by Michael Faber’s b-series plugins. Btransform was the variation that I immediately understood, working as a linked pair, the first with power 1 and a split, the second with power ~20, the multiple copies nicely filling the split in the first.
I soon learned to nest them.
Then a similar effect in parallel, using the move variable.
There was also a short spell revisiting gnarls and introducing some original twists: hybrids, hypergnarls and a method for adding texture.
But the b-series called again, this time feeding the entire splits-elliptic pattern through its multiplicative structure.
Nice recap!