Process: Decay

I had an idea of creating a piece where elements of it are decided by chance. The technique I decided on was rolling a pair of die, and somehow making use of the numbers generated.

Before starting anything however, I had to establish rules, and have some form of a plan as to what the finished article would look like!

I decided on dimensions and broke the artboard up into a grid 60 squares wide by 39 squares tall. Each square on the grid was then broken into four equal pieces, like this:

Each segment was to have a random colour applied to it, strictly in this order – left, top, right and bottom. Once the square is completed, we move onto the next block on the right, and so on. Once the line is finished, we start all the way back at the left hand side of the next line down.

In case you’re wondering, I had set myself the task of rolling dice 9,360 times and recording each outcome. Before I could start that lovely job, I had to decide on a colour palette. Thankfully this didn’t have to be set in stone from the outset – Adobe Illustrator allows you to select an object and then easily pick up all other objects that share the same colour, so making amends can be a snap. So the palette consisted of 11 colours to match each possible outcome of the sum of two dice.

I knew that seven is the most likely outcome of a roll, so I made sure that I chose a strong colour for that one. Other likely numbers were also appointed colours that I was happy would tend to dominate.

I would have been happy with a piece that continued with this setup from start to finish, but I wanted to explore what happens when this rule gradually changes.

I decided that the colour on 12 could be called the background colour, and that after 12 rows, one random number adopts the same hue. The pattern continues like this for three rows, and then another colour is lost. This formula repeats itself to the bottom of the piece, introducing interesting areas of space as the background gradually takes over.

End stage

After around five weeks of short (almost daily) sessions building up the piece, it was finally completed. I had to treat it as a marathon rather than a sprint, as working up more than one or two lines at a time was time consuming and rather mundane – no matter how keen I was to wrap things up and see the finished article.

As mentioned earlier, it was fairly simple to experiment with different colour schemes and so I settled on six versions

Decay Type 1

Decay Type 2

Decay Type 3

Decay Type 4

Decay Type 5

Decay Type 6