Loom is based on an overall graphics engine, but it is easy to forget about the engine’s more general capacities when focusing on the details of shape subdivision. At the weekend, for instance, somebody asked if there was any means of scratching back portions of the rendered image. I recalled that I can erase a shape simply by inverting the drawing color. Which set me thinking about drawing a shape multiple times, which is fundamentally, of course, animation with no background redraw. The Loom engine was designed to do precisely this kind of thing, but I hadn’t considered the possibility for ages. So anyway, the image below involves no scratching out, but is the product of a set of iterative drawing cycles with a subtle amount of scaling, This produces a strange sense of motion blur, with stillness and clarity at the center and pronounced blur at the edges.
twisted
I have also been playing with the subdivision of more organic shapes.
shape