Gradients and Blur was borne out of my discovery of a how to properly draw gradients in p5.js. Took me a while but we got there. I've been wanting to learn since being inspired by the work of Max Drekker.
I was writing a function that performed Gaussian blur on the canvas, but each pixel only had a certain probability of not being blurred. This way, the edge between two different colors was preserved, and the blur looked grainy. In experimenting with that, I found I could blur areas farther away from the edge, which made things look like they were glowing when it was black mixed with some other color. I had inadvertently discovered unsharp masking.
As for the "swoopy" nature of a lot of these pieces, I used an older function from Ribbons where I drew long Bezier curves across the canvas.
Because of the clever blurring, some of these pieces, especially the last one, remind me of neon signs glowing in the dark.
