My initial goal was to combine programming and drawing to create illustrations, but in the process of doing so I realized that my actual goal was slightly different. It wasn’t about combining two media, but combining two ways of working: procedurally and by hand. 

 

I have a tendency to always look for a method, a system, a collection of rules and patterns; this is perhaps the common thread that ties programming and illustration together, for me. They both involve setting up structures with their own internal logic. This project was an opportunity to think procedurally about illustrations, and also to realize the limits of procedural thinking, because in the end there is always some feeling of aliveness missing from pure structure. I tried to strike a balance between relying on rules and trusting the process of searching and discovery.

 

I decided to focus my project on trees because they are complex forms that follow well-defined rules but have a lot of room for variation. Most of the trees were generated by an add-on I wrote for the open-source 3D modeling program Blender. Other elements include ink, digital drawings, manipulated photographs, and graphics generated in Processing.