Section 1. Design Statement

Our image series will explore several elements of design – including shape, picture plane, scale, rhythm, color and texture.
We will be playing with shape primarily in the left most element of each image, that is in the polygon figure. This figure may appear more round or more pointed, more geometric or more abstract, depending on the number of sides in each polygon and the number of polygon copies, which will be determined by the n parameter (see below). In addition, the complexity of this shape/set of shapes will contrast with the uniformity and simplicity of the "black dot" to the right of the polygon figure. The offset between the polygon centers will create a three-dimensional effect when there are at least several polygon copies, which is likely to be interpreted as a stretched slinky, or slinky in motion.
Our images will play with positive and negative space, principles of the picture plane, by utilizing bright colors for the background and the polygon figure and black for the "black dot". This will create a "vacuum effect" since the "black dot" will be perceived as a negative space void, while the rest of the image is likely to be interpreted as positive space in comparison.
By changing the size of the dot relative to the polygon figure, our image series will present experimentation with scale. In some images, the dot will be small, creating the illusion that the polygon figure is very large, or that the dot is far away. In other images, the black dot will be larger than the polygon figure, creating the perception that the polygon figure is much smaller, or that the dot is closer to the viewer. (This also may be considered an exploration of perspective.)
The repetition of the polygon in the spun-and-spaced figure will incorporate rhythm, since we will be presenting multiple identical units in a deliberate pattern.
In this series, we will present a variety of color schemes, all of which will show discord between the background color and the foreground (polygon) color. The dot will remain a constant black color, creating a strand of consistency that will help to link the images in our series together as a coherent exploration of design.
The image background will not, however, be a uniform shade of color. Rather, we will apply lightened, darkened, and phase-shifted shades of a single color to various pixels of the backdrop. This will create a speckled, grooved-looking texture, which will contrast with the harsh, solid black of the dot and help to distribute the viewer's attention throughout the entire image.



Section 2. Technique Statement

Our procedure incorporates several design-based procedures and techniques, including GIMP tools, turtles, image-compute to set individual pixels, and recursion to create/shift polygon copies. We will ensure that our procedure is capable of producing 1000+ distinct images by setting up 4 variable features (polygon sides, polygon copies/spacing pattern, color scheme, and dot size), each with number of options that is relatively prime (5, 9, 7 and 4) so that when used in a modular function they will not overlap; the product of these numbers of options will be greater than 1000, indicating more than 1000 unique feature combinations.

We will use image-select-ellipse! to capture the negative space dot, and the additional GIMP procedures context-set-fgcolor!, along with image-fill-selection!, to color it black.
• the left and top parameters will change depending on the height and width input by the user, but, in general, the dot will appear to the upper-right of the spun polygons.
• The width and height parameters will change depending on n, using an exponential function with (modulo 4 n), multiplied by a constant that is based on the user-input dimensions. This will ensure that our dot with scale appropriately, that it will fit in the image, and that there will be four relative size-options at each height/width input combination. At least one of the size-options will create a tiny dot, and at least one will create a gigantic dot. We had originally planned to use list-ref to select among size-options, but we realized that this was unnecessary, and would not be the best way to make sure our dot scaled with the image size. When image-height is equal to image-width, the dot will be a circle.

We will define an association list of seven color schemes, which will allow us to more explicitly coordinate our discordant backdrop and polygon colors. We will use (modulo 7 n) to rotate color scheme selection using assoc. Although we had originally planned to use list-ref with two separate lists (polygon-list and background-list), we realized that using this new strategy would be a clearer way to store, access, and read the matched color schemes.

We will be using a version of turtle-spin-centered-polygon! that allows us to specify the center of the spun polygons; however, we have created helpers for this procedure that use mutual recursion to change the position of the center each time a new polygon is drawn, based on the original number of polygon copies—determined by a function that utilizes modulo to select the number of copies (between 1-9) based on n. This means that there are 9 different possible patterns for the spacing of the polygon centers, which are coordinated with the 9 possibilities for number of copies. 

We will set the polygon color using (turtle-set-color! turtle polygon-color), where polygon-color has been selected from the color-schemes association list (last element of each entry).

We will be using image-compute! to create a new image with an interesting background texture.
Our color transformation function will use irgb-lighter, irgb-darker, and irgb-phaseshift to transform the backdrop color (selected based on n, part of the overall color scheme) such that the canvas appears complexly-colored (likely to be interpreted as speckled and grooved), using list-ref with a sin function to select shades from a locally-defined list (where the contents are ultimately based on n). This is our favorite part of the image.