Broken Courbet

I created this series for a design course project where the goal was to take a digital tool, push it past its breaking point, then find a way to use its broken state to create something new.

I experimented with the Blend feature in Adobe Illustrator, which is a powerful way to create smooth transitions from one vector to another. But it gets confused when you ask it blend a large number of outlines at once.

I played with that effect, overloading the blending with thousands of elements — in this series, fields of color processed from a Gustave Courbet self-portrait, The Desperate Man.

After the first pass, the painting’s figurative quality and composition disappear.

But feeding these shapes back into the Blend tool over and over has the opposite effect – as the density of shapes multiplies, the blending paths themselves begin building up new contours that give the portrait a sense of dimension again.