Studio notes / Stage 1

Source.

Vintage cameras, algorithmic generation, hand-drawn marks, and public domain imagery provide the raw material that seeds every artwork.

Work with the image

A working study

Your image and decisions continue through these four pages.

Study 01384 × 384 px

Preparing the study…

Source / before

Stage 1 / 04

Start with something worth changing.

Look for structure before detail. Soft textures, generated fields, and geometric tiles each give the next operation a different starting condition.

PNG, JPEG, WebP, GIF, BMP or AVIF · up to 20 MB. The study fits the longest side within 384 pixels without stretching or cropping. Animated files use their first frame.

A new source begins a new study. Photographs, scans, marks, and generated fields can all set the starting conditions.

Developing the image…

Return to the whole study

Input Sources

Each source contributes a distinct texture vocabulary before algorithmic transformation begins.

MVC-FD91 · 0.8MP CCD · 1.44 MB

01 / 640×480 · JPEG · Floppy disk

Low-Res Digital Cameras

Vintage cameras like the Sony Mavica MVC-FD91 — floppy-disk photography at 640×480. The inherent compression artifacts and limited dynamic range become features, not flaws. Each JPEG artifact is a collaboration between silicon and intention.

Resolution constraints force compositional discipline. What survives lossy compression reveals the essential.

256² · Perlin Field

02 / Perlin · Fractals · Automata

Algorithmic Generation

Procedural imagery from code — Perlin noise fields, fractal landscapes, cellular automata, reaction-diffusion systems. Every pixel is computed, never captured.

Algorithms as collaborators. The code proposes, the artist curates.

Ink on Paper · Digitised

03 / Ink · Charcoal · Digitised

Brush Drawing

Hand-drawn marks digitised and fed into the pipeline. Human gesture meets computational transformation — the imprecision of the hand becomes raw material for algorithmic processing.

The human mark provides what algorithms cannot: intentional imperfection.

CC0 · Public Archive

04 / Botanical · Scientific · Vintage

Public Domain Sources

Planets, vintage clipart, scientific imagery, botanical illustrations — anything that sparks inspiration. These seed images are never the output; they're the starting condition for algorithmic evolution.

Found imagery as cultural DNA. The algorithm transforms context into abstraction.