Once I was captivated by the flow of brush strokes created by Flowfield Driven Drawing it was only a small step to explore which other flowfields might evoke beautiful drawings.

cc-licensed at OpenProcessing.org

[space] switch flow map
[0] reset flow map position
[s] save image to disk

[d] dodge on/off
[b] brush on/off
[g] grain fine/rough
[l] lines short/long

[c] colors (daVinci, blackboard, crayons …)
[w] whirl direction
[i] isolines

[x] more x-hatch
[z] less x-hatch

Codex Processianus I

Codex Processianus III

Codex Processianus IV

Check out the Codex Processianus Flickr Set for more results.

Since I have a long standing fascination with fractals, accompanied by a natural repulsion towards those rainbow colour palettes, that were so popular in the fractal art scene, I decided to use flow field driven design to create fractal drawings, in the style of Leonardo Da Vinci's Studies of water and flow.

Leonardo Da Vinci: Deluge

Leonardo Da Vinci: Studies of Water passing Obstacles and falling

Flow Map underlying the Mandelbrot Design

The underlying flow fields were created using the same kind of trans- formations that are used in calculating the Mandelbrot and Julia set in fractal geometry.

Since flow fields are sampled at the pixel level, they can be saved as images or flowmaps, which represent the direction of flow as the hue of a pixel, and the speed of flow as saturation or brightness.

Jason Stephens has used the Codex Processianus source code to create his own flow map based artworks.

Jason Stephen's Flow Map based Art

You can find them on the Jason's blog or his Flickr stream