Colour plays a critical role in my art. Initially I experimented with manually-constructed palettes, but I found them artificial and often designed for other purposes, such as data visualisations or user interfaces. The solution came when I remembered an artwork by Spencer Finch called The River That Flows Both Ways that was installed on the High Line in New York 2009–2016. It is made up of glass tiles, each one coloured according to pixels in photographs of the Hudson River.

From this idea I developed a process to automatically derive palettes from my own photography, and all my generative art has since used one or more of the colour palettes created from real-life photography, bringing naturally occuring colour combinations into the digitally generated art.

As can be seen below, sometimes the colours in the palettes are cleanly separated, in other situations they might be blended.

The colours are also associated with an affinity based on how common they are to appear together in the original source image. This is not always used, but can be clearly seen in the Aspen Hike example below (and in the Affinities section).

In addition, the substrates are generated from the palettes, and sometimes overlayed with a maze pattern to create interesting structures. For more information see the Substrate section.