Ernstpiration

Inspiration

Even after all the research I did on human made surface designs it was the natural ones that really drew me in. Nature has this unique ability to make a pattern that isn't really a pattern or look symmetrical when there really is no symmetry.

I recently discovered the work of Ernst Haeckel, someone who was able to document nature with incredible accuracy but also with an eye for the beauty of it all. He was both an artist and a scientist, something I would like say about myself. I took out a book about his work at the AUArts Library titled "Art Forms from the Abyss", although me dream books is "The Art and Science of Ernst Haeckel", so that I could see more of his work.

There's not much I can say about these illustrations other than I'm just mesmerized by them. Here's a few images from The Paris Review regarding that book I so desperately want.

One thing that's noticeable in the images is the asymmetrical symmetry that nature is so good at.

Experiments

I started just trying to closely emulate on of the illustrations, just to get a feel for the style and the Hatch command in Rhino. For colours I just stuck to a monochromatic colour scheme using color.adobe.com.

I then decided to add shadows to see if I could add a sense of depth but that just meant re-hatching pretty much every piece as the shadows would overlay a previous hatch.

Moving forward I need to forget about hatching until I feel like I have the entire design complete.

My Design

For my design attempt I did all my line work first. I kept it all symmetrical at the start. Before using Trim, I would then make tweaks to to the curves to remove a bit of the symmetry and pattern.

There are going to be some challenges with hatching, the main one being the little balls. How do I indicate separation without lines. Likely, I'll need to use a bunch of different but similar colours but that will be quite tedious.

I think I may add some more features that sort of amplify the "creepiness". I added with circle patterns to play on the feeling caused by trypophobia.

Here's my first colour test, we'll see what kind of feedback I get from everyone, I think it can be better.

EDIT - October 5

The main feedback I got was to add some nuance to the imperfections of the petal caps or maybe go in a new direction. I didn't quite have time to come up with a new approach but I 100% agree that the petal caps felt off. I readjusted them and as expected it was a pain once the hatching was done. I had to redo a bunch and redo some curves too. Somewhere along my process I somehow deleted my curves for the dots on the petals, it wasn't even in past incremental save files. I did discover that DupBorder works on Hatches though so that's a relief.