Behind the Work

Last updated - Sep 13th

Trichro-matic is an on-chain generative piece designed for screen and print, with a focus on colour as a representation of structure and depth.

An early experiment applying rhythm to colour

The Story

With the recent mass adoption of Display P3 in WebGL, a much larger range of colours are now achievable in a modern web browser, far closer to what’s achievable in print. This inspired me to shift my style from strong line work to focus on colour as a foundation.

This piece features both hand-selected and algorithmically-generated colour palettes, with the latter designed to evoke similar emotion to the former, Hence the name: Trichro-matic - The ability to see all three primary colours, with the hyphenated ’o-matic’ a term often applied to the name of fictional machines.

Early on in the creation of this piece, I explored using 2d shapes with differing rhythms of colour to create contrast and line. It became fascinating to me how adjustments to this process could toy with my sense of depth.

These experiments encouraged the shapes to feel extruded in a variety of different ways, shifting the perception of what the colours represented within the structure.

This simple idea became the foundation of the Trichro-matic algorithm.

Leaning into this, A more complex algorithm was created to generate larger geometric structures, these could then be interpreted differently through the lens of colour and texture, allowing for interpretation and analysis, with aspects of the composition broken up through displacement.