Subdivided Rounded Squares

One rounded rectangle per cell, at a random fraction of the cell — so the sizes come from the grid, not from a list.

Divide, then inscribe

The subdivision is the same quad-split the rest of the family uses: split a square into four, recurse to a fixed depth, and hand every leaf to a draw function. What this one draws is a single rounded rectangle, centred in the cell, scaled by one random number:

var u = MinScale + (1f - MinScale) * (float)rng.NextDouble();
var size = s * u;

s is the cell’s half-size, so the rectangle is somewhere between a point and the inscribed square — uniformly, with no bias, above whatever floor the rendering sets. The lead rendering keeps the floor at zero, so its sizes are the raw uniform draw.

Step 01

One cell, one rectangle. The only thing decided here is how much of its cell the rectangle claims.

Sizes without a size list

There is no distribution of shape sizes written anywhere in this piece. Sizes come out of the structure: a cell at depth d has half-size Size × 2⁻ᵈ, and its rectangle is a uniform fraction of that.

So the finished drawing has rectangles at five discrete scales — one per depth — each of which is then smeared uniformly downward by its own random factor. That combination is what makes the field look like a considered composition rather than a scatter: the large gaps are the large cells whose rectangles happened to come out small, and they exist at every scale.

Step 02

One division. Four quadrants, four independent scalings.

Step 03

Sixteen cells. The size variation is uniform, but the eye reads variation in size as variation in distance, so a flat drawing acquires depth it was never given.

The corners

var r = RoundCorner / 100f;
path.ArcTo(r * size, r * size, 0, SKPathArcSize.Small, SKPathDirection.Clockwise, …);

The corner radius is a fraction of the rectangle’s own size, not a constant. At RoundCorner = 40 every rectangle rounds off two fifths of its half-width, regardless of how big it is — so a tiny rectangle is exactly as round as a large one, and the whole field is self-similar in its corner treatment as well as in its layout.

Push it to 100 and every rectangle becomes a circle; drop it to 0 and they are all squares. The renderings use both ends and the middle: sharp chamfers in the quilt, moderate rounding in the lead, and full circles wherever a rendering wants bubbles or dots.

Step 04

Sixty-four cells.

Step 05

Four levels: 256 cells. Individual rectangles are still readable, but the field is starting to dominate.

Step 06

Five levels: 1,024 cells and 1,024 rectangles. None of them overlaps, because each one is inscribed in a cell and the cells tile the square exactly. All the apparent overlap in the drawing is adjacency.

Six renderings

Rendering	Structure	Ink
Bubble Cyan	stroked grid, moderate corners	cyan on black
Mosaic	the same grid filled instead of stroked	cream and cobalt tiles on slate
Aurora	the same grid, ink sampled by cell row	rose → orchid → indigo ramp on plum
Limelight	circles, lattice cropped by the canvas	lime on near-black green
Constellation	large amber rings under fine dots	periwinkle and amber on indigo
Diamond Quilt	the grid rotated 45°	near-black ink on warm paper

None of the six is a recolor of another. Each rendering moves a different structural lever — fill, color-by-position, extent and crop, layering, rotation — while the subdivision underneath stays the same, which is the point: the variety is what the one algorithm does when its parameters are pushed around.

Every rendering fills its canvas the same way: the root cell of the subdivision is the canvas, so the field runs edge to edge and the outermost cells touch the frame of the picture. The one exception is the quilt, whose rotated lattice inscribes the canvas instead — its tips reach the edges and the four corner triangles stay paper, the composition’s deliberate whitespace.

The finished piece, framed

The gallery closes with one plate that is not another rendering: the lead work hung the way it would be at the gallery — behind a mat and a thin frame, on the wall. The framing is pure presentation. It renders the lead exactly as the other plates do, then places that picture on the wall with MuseumFrame in the sources, so nothing about the generative design changes between the raw plate and the framed one.

Determinism

SeededRandom — the project’s stable PCG32 — is seeded from the preset and consumed once per leaf in the subdivision’s traversal order, plus one extra draw per leaf when a rendering picks its ink per cell. Row-sampled ink consumes nothing. The underlay lattice draws from its own stream, offset from the preset seed by a constant, so its parameters never shift the main lattice. Same seed, same field.

Progression 06

Variant 06

Gallery 01