Verious

Verious is a body of large-scale fine art exploring technology, mortality, and systems of belief. It's also a piece of software I built because no existing tool could make what I had in mind. The art and the engine are inseparable — the work only exists at the scale and consistency I want because I wrote the thing that produces it.

The problem

I design each piece as layered artwork in professional illustration software, with a strict, consistent color palette and a library of reusable visual components so the work hangs together across very different pieces.

But the final image isn't the design file — it's the result of running my own visual "recipes" over those layers: filling shapes with texture, growing intricate patterns across the canvas, stamping forms by the thousand. And it has to come out at archival print resolution. A single piece can be 15,300 by 19,800 pixels — enormous, far larger than ordinary software can render in one go.

How it works

The engine's job is to make that scale manageable. It breaks each giant canvas into a grid of small tiles — on the order of 1,200 of them per piece — renders each tile on its own, then stitches them back into one seamless, full-resolution image ready to print.

To do it well, it uses three different technologies, each for what it's best at: a fast, interactive preview while I work; a step that faithfully captures the design-tool layers; and a final, high-powered renderer that works on many tiles at the same time to assemble the finished piece quickly. The upshot is that I can keep experimenting at a comfortable speed and still get a flawless, gallery-scale print at the end.

The craft

All of that machinery exists to serve the art. The consistent palette, the reusable component system, and a disciplined visual language are what give the collection a coherent identity across pieces of wildly different scale. The finished prints are proofed and produced on a professional archival printer.

The engineering is meant to be completely invisible in the gallery — you're supposed to see the work, not the 1,200 tiles it took to render it.

The finished pieces live at verious.io.