GALAXY, part 9

[The GALAXY Project is a light-art installation that I’m working on for the next burn. Phase I is essentially a spiral labyrinth consisting of hundreds of glowing rings made of EL.]

In the spirit of GESTALT, it was time to go back to the Pixelmator sketch of GALAXY and see if I could tighten it up. The main thing I wanted to do was to make sure that the rings were to scale. It would have been nice, of course, if the original ABORTIVE ATTEMPT had been to scale, but who thinks of such things during the white heat of inspiration. (Me, usually, but let that pass.)

It would also have been nice if there had been some way to select all the large rings, for example, and shrink them to the right scale all at once. Alas, if there is such a way, I never found it. So I had to make a copy of the original file (for the spiral under-layer), then delete all 180-something rings. And start over.

Fortunately, these things are not difficult, just tedious. At least this time I was able to group the sizes as I was going along rather than having to backtrack and do it after creating hundreds of rings.

End result:

Phase 1 spiral, stage 2: rings to scale

The original for comparison:

Phase I spiral, ABORTIVE ATTEMPT

The main difference is that the scaled version now requires 200 rings, which is a bit more than before. So Stage 3 will be to delete maybe 30–40 of the rings while maintaining the integrity of the spiral.

Onward!