Microcosm

~ A wondrous tiny world. A universe in miniature. ~

Microcosm is a project that draws ideas and inspiration from a series of my previous sketches. It's an artwork where most of everything consists of tiny dots in different configurations: the clusters of dots that make up the patches, the cells and the squircles that occasionally enclose the patches.

The idea of making everything out of dots to convey a sort of hand-drawn style is derived from the ornamental lines in my Vestige GT. It is also an exploration on unorderly and uneven grids constructed via a rectangle packing algorithm that I discovered while working on random walkers.

I hope you enjoy the sketch as much as I enjoyed making it.

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Notes on interactivity:

1. Left and right arrow keys toggle between the different views (1:1, landscape 16:9 and portrait 9:16 aspect ratios).

2. Press S or the down arrow key to download a .png of the current view you're in (right click save to capture entire screen).

3. Press I or the upwards arrow key to toggle the information screen that tells you about the features of your three views.

4. Clicking, and tapping on mobile on the left, right, bottom and top portions of the sketch effecuate the same actions, respectively.

5. You can also toggle grain ON and OFF via the G key.

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Note on features:

PALETTE: The palette from which the cell patch colors are drawn.

SCALE: Overall size of the grid (number of rows and columns).

SPLIT: The percentage of cell patches which are contained within a squircle (as opposed to those that are not).

SPACING: maximum distance points can have in between each other in their respective clusters.

GRID_TYPE: randomization method by which the grid was created (there are a couple rare ones).

SHUFFLE_DRAW: Wether the initial drawing phase is done in order or not.

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Addendum:

Features shown next to the sketch on fxhash correlate to those of the 1:1 aspect ratio sketch (the first view). The color palette is the sole feature that is shared between the three different views. This means that you are effectively obtaining three completely unique configurations.