Don't tell the others, but Chamfered Orbit is genuinely one of my favorites, and while it's technically simple, it took 6 years to make. As the first piece that I had the honor of selling after the launch of the website, I thought I'd give you a breakdown of how it was made!
It started on a snowy walk in February 2019, when I snapped this picture of a tree trunk with some snow on it on the Northwest Branch trail in Maryland:
In addition to the obvious visual division, I loved all the different axes of contrast in the photo:
- dark & light
- hard & soft
- warm & cold
... and so I hung onto it for a long time, until one day in October 2025, I wanted to try out a new suite of filters I'd downloaded for the image manipulation software. I have a whole blog post planned for the future about my journey from Photoshop to GIMP and how cool it is to be part of the open-source software community, but suffice it to say in this post that I have really been enjoying the G'MIC set of filters, and exploring the different ways that math can make pictures even prettier.*
So first, something I like to try out quite often is seeing how things look upside-down, as even when though the finished product is almost always unrecognizable from the textures, the change in lighting can create a very interesting sort of "subliminal disjointedness."
Then I started to feel like pushing the contrast between the snow and the bark, so I added some extra "flavor" and overlaid it in a complimentary blue. If you've known me for any amount of time, you'll know that I'm a sucker for blue and brown together.
After this, the range of colors started to seem a little bit too much, so i capped it, and threw in some eccentric/concentric rotation to even further drive home the idea of contrast — this time between the radial dynamic and the linear ones that had started to emerge.
Then I used yet another G'MIC plugin to add EVEN MORE contrasting patterns, this time giving the bark side of the equation a little more wood-ness. I liked this step a lot because even though it didn't look anywhere near finished, it really started to feel like it was coming together. I didn't even realize how close I was.
Afterwards — and this is something else that I like to do a lot — I brought the original image to the front (or in this case, the rotated version) and I applied the same shape-shifting filters to it, and overlaid it on top of what I had:
And immediately I knew I was coming in for a landing. I don't know about you, but to me, this piece feels a lot like if I were to make Van Gogh's "Starry Night" — not that I think I belong in the same conversation as one of the greatest painters of all time, but I can certainly imitate him. At any rate, I knew that what I had was too dark, and so I took another copy of the previous state, blended it on top, et voilà!
All that was left was to come up with a name, and with the astral visions of "Starry Night" still rotating around my head, I thought Chamfered Orbit seemed like a pretty good name, and that was that! So if you're lucky enough to be at this right place at this right time, you can pick up a launch edition print of Chamfered Orbit or any of the launch artworks in the store until the 14th of August. If you'd like to stop relying on luck for that kind of thing, you can sign up for my newsletter at the bottom of this very page.
And it's my birthday! So feel free to send me any lovely well wishes you like, and as always, thanks for reading!
*Let's be honest, "Math Make Pretty Picture" could be the tagline for this website, no?
