Blend Work

Predating our generative phase, we found Illustrator to be a convenient and clever enough drawing tool to create arrays of lines between two curves. Essentially your options in the workflow are to define the quantity of subdivisions you'd like via some metric (quantity, distance of spacing) as well as the orientation of the iterations be they tangent to the spine of the blend or parallel to the curves at each end.

Pretty straight forward we suppose but a few blends get you a long way towards creating appealing geometric work fairly quickly. 

Here are some examples of blends and any tricks added to them for their effects:

Blend 1

This really was the first blend set-up we put together.. It had originally been drawn back in Providence in 2019, this one we printed on our Canon pro100 testing some cardstock printing.. anyways it's two very basic curve blends showing evenly incremented divisions between two curves. We learned that node placement can matter quite a bit as it defines the blended curves splines as well so you can adjust some of the flow of the blend by changing the spline handles of the parent curves.

Later Blend (6-8?)

Using four lines you can create a blended grid that conforms to the bounding box of the parent curves.. You can also create a bent grid by blending twice between four overlapping lines in two locations which we found to be a lot of fun for making warped illusions like this next image

These next blends were made using fills for each curve and after the blend was complete a boolean operation was used to leave just the outline information for pl0tb0t. We had originally drawn blends like these combining multiple parent lines into one large blend but were not able to draw them for some time until we figured out how to get around the occlusion problem. Glad it's sorted now but overlapping blends like all the previous images look great too.

All in all, we've plotted about 20 or so blends and they're a great exercise when we're feeling low on creative juice to try coming up with a new interesting curve set to blend with. It's an incredibly simple generative technique that we've gone on to keep using in our scripting.. subdividing, incrementing.. it was very nice to use a tool able to create these generations for us and it's nice having control over the parent curves before the blend occurs rather than having to seed your way through random generations.. Certainly you haven't seen the last of Blends from us..