Cypraea

Cypraea are a type of sea snail or cowry, with a smooth, rounded, polished shell.

This started out as playing around with the technique described in Amy Goodchild’s great Curved Line Jellyfish blogpost, which describes a method for drawing some very elegant jellyfish-like shapes. A good chunk of the effort went into implementing Catmull-Rom splines in Golang to mirror the p5js curve() function used in the blogpost (more as an exercise for myself).

I added a few twists to the method, including a more granular noise function (fractional brownian motion), using my own implementation of “sandpainting” to draw along the curves, gradient of colour changes along the lines themselves (rather than across different lines), and the lines to the control points are painted also to give the dramatic “rays of light” effect.