Glass Abstract Minimalist Bird

Higher quality versions: G+ | Ello | Dribbble | Imgur

Scrolling down my Tumblr dashboard the other day, I came across a photo titled “A bright red sloop in the harbor, 2011” from Photographer Yola Monakhov Stockton’s series “The Nature of Imitation (2010-2014)”. The color palette of her image inspired me, and I knew I had to create something new which utilized it. Aware that I had very little mental energy left over that night from the drudgery of my dayjob, I knew that if I wanted to be able to take advantage of the inspiration and create anything new at all, it couldn’t be completed using any of my typically precision-focused workflows. With that extremely limiting constraint in mind, I also noted that I had not created anything abstract and representative yet minimal in a while. This is what I came up with. It was both uncomfortable and liberating to take a set of shapes and manually arrange them in space without any kind of grid or mirroring tool to enforce the symmetry in this design, but I think that’s exactly what makes this piece look like it has so much implied motion in the frozen pose.

I think that this animation pairs unusually well with this musicbox version of Studio Ghibli’s “Castle In The Sky” Theme.