Touching Grass is a series where I’ll be examining the relationship a digital artist has with their medium and subject of choice.

The first piece - "The Mountain" - is a nod to Alexander von Humboldt, a naturalist who explored much of South America. I include a quote from him:

"Nature must be experienced through feeling".

I want this art to convey a physical feeling. The feeling of touching physical paper, or physical grass, or anything in nature. You can see the difference in texture zoomed in here

I want the viewer to feel the fibrous strands in the paper, even though the medium is digital code.

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The first piece, “The Mountain” sold for 2.33 ETH to @5280ross. He took the buyer’s choice to grab the second piece, “Evening Ascent” for half the settling price of the first, 1.17 ETH.

Both pieces were coded with p5js and the texture I examined in the pair is cardboard paper.

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The next two pieces in the series, titled “a cartoon chair” and “shadows of a lamp” are a study of the texture of wood.

The story of the mountain continues, with a more zoomed-out perspective. This time, the viewer is inside a cabin in the foothills of the mountain.

Now, for the textural study. As you can see with the zoomed in look at the floorboards, each individual piece has its own wood grain. It took a lot of experimenting and completely re-doing the floor until it looked in a way that I’d describe as natural wood.

While I made the wood grain with an algorithm, each and every nail in the floor was hand-coded to be placed there. I find that this mimics real life in a very interesting manner. While wood grain is almost “magical” in the way its pattern forms, nails in the floor are an act of human labor. Much like a real carpenter, I hammered each and every one in to place.

The first piece, “a cartoon chair” was auctioned on April 18th-April 19th and sold for 1.3 ETH to @wetpotatobrain. He took the option of securing the second piece, “shadows of a lamp” for 0.65 ETH in a private sale.