The Source

The Source is an ode to water. With Matthieu Segret, a friend of many years, we spent a year writing a program that draws rivers, rain and torrents as if in watercolour, ink and pencil. gm.studio selected it and released it in July 2023, in 118 editions.

How it draws

Each edition paints itself in front of you, like the timelapse of a watercolour: first the flow of the water, then the ink lines, then the colour. The watercolour texture alone took months to get right; the making-of tells the whole story, from the first tests to the final version.

Every edition takes the colours of one of seventeen rivers, from the Amazon to the Lez that runs through Montpellier, and one of fourteen states of water, from still to torrential.

Made by two

Matthieu paints in watercolour; I am drawn to mathematics and shaders. The Source grew out of that difference, over a year of sessions like this one.

On paper

We wanted the prints to hold up from the start. On Hahnemühle German Etching paper, they have fooled experienced watercolour painters. Collectors can press P to export a file made for printing.

5% of the proceeds went to Oceana. Code: glsl-noise, glsl-random, glsl-hsl2rgb, glsl-aastep, fx(stdio) and Inigo Quilez’s SDF snippets. More on the making of it: the story behind The Source.