Digital Tools: The Art of The Gif

 

This GIF (much like the others that I have made) came about largely by accident. I began making the pattern by kind of stamping with a brush that I had created while attempting to mimic a motif in Sicilian tiles that I was referencing. There is now very little resemblance, but I like the way that it turned out. It’s my first GIF that employs bold colors and I’m pleased with the continuity that’s created beyond the frame by the pattern. It seems like a pattern that could be used in fashion design, so I wanted to echo that same kind of dynamism in the GIF. I used a lens warping effect within a center sphere in the frame in order to create this flashing/popping effect.

I’m a big fan of delicate and soft color palettes— shades and tones which seem to seamlessly meld with each other. There’s a strange metallic yet even flesh-like quality to the palette in this GIF, and it strikes me as being as off-putting as it is pretty. I had a very specific reference for the pattern, copying the rectangular designs that covered a building I had photographed in Prague. Each corner of the square converged in a center point, which gave it a really cool three-dimensionality that I kept coming back to. I found that it does interesting things to other images when used as a transparent overlay. These crinkling distortions are just that— distortions that I played around with in GIMP. It looks like they ended up having a sort of wave effect which I find really cool.

 

This was the one pattern that I made from something in my sketchbook. It was just a very simple floral line design which I managed to cut out and color in GIMP, turning it ultimately into a brush. There’s not really a specific inspiration for this, other than my admiration for more complex floral patterns and sinuous lines. I wasn’t quite sure how to turn it into a GIF, so I ended up making distortions in alternating sections of the image.

Author: Frank Chlumsky