I will be posting the 100 best rated of these according to a wordpress plug-in called picsmash that I ran on my poor neglected web site. Trust me you don't want to see all of them. My master plan is to post one every few days in the order they were made. I could just dump them all out at once, but that doesn't seem like much fun.
Fun facts about the Big Hard Squares.
I made 1000 of these based on these simple but very restricted rules:
Each square must have a square color background, with two right triangles and a rectangle in the foreground. Shapes can overlap and be any color or size within the background square. This allows other shapes to be made from the three foreground shapes.
I think these got better over time. Here is the breakdown of how many made the top one hundred from beginning to end. For some reason there is a peak from 600-700, and again at the very end.
1-100 2
101-200 5
201-300 9
301-400 12
401-500 9
501-600 9
601-700 20
701-800 10
801-900 9
901-1000 14
I started in march of 2012, and it took me 2 years to get around to making all of them.
I am a procrastinator.
There were some spin-offs that found there way on to deviant art.
Somewhere along the way I started choosing the background color values for hue, saturation and value using a random number generator. Although this might be seen as an additional restriction, I found it made the formula a bit easier to live with.
I didn't change any of the other rules even though I grew to really wish they allowed more freedom. If I could go back in time, I would give myself a lecture about the sunk cost fallacy, and change the dam rules.
I went through a phase where I tried to find really jarring or unusual color combinations. This was in most cases a bad idea.
I allowed myself to use gradients, but usually didn't.
Most of the time I was really trying even though some of them are really ugly. They made sense to me at the time, and I find that disturbing.
Some times I wasn't trying at all.
You can't believe everything you think.
I am looking for ways of making complicated large scale works using simple small scale components.
Sometimes I like to make projects that encourage other artists to make derivative works, but the rules for Big Hard Square suck and I wouldn't do that to my fellow humans.
Empathy is a trait that helps humans survive.
