Part 2 of the story of A Scheme Not Of This World starts with the code development and prototyping. It then looks at the test printing and the production of the first batch of one-of prints. (Part 1 is here.)
Hello, colour
Today’s post about the development of “A Scheme Not Of This World” starts with one of the very first runs of the code that combined the large and small scale blocks of code. (As the former was called “Scheme of Things” and the latter “A World Not Of This World”, you can see the remarkable leap of imagination to reach the final title.)
At the same time, I was experimenting with adding different numbers of layers within each cell. The darker the tone of the yellow and magenta cells, the more layers of content that will eventually be added. I’m also tinkering with transparency. Hand-made content will start to feature very soon…


Hello, library
The next part of the “A Scheme Not Of This World” story involves starting to replace the squares of plain colour (above) with content from the library. This is a folder of a few hundred images that I made by hand at the start of the process.
There’s a few other things going on here too, not least some code that “tears” the edges of the library images. The thin lines are to help experiment with the degree of overlap of all the separate parts.
Prototyping starts
One of the very first prototypes of “A Scheme Not Of This World” where all the content came from the hand-made image library. To keep things simple at this stage, the code only worked with a few images (the final version uses hundreds).
I was also playing with scale at this stage, varying the width of the stripes. Lots still to come, including rotation and a big chunk of code that works on the colour of everything.


Prototyping ends
This image, from Part 2 of the story of A Scheme Not Of This World”, marks the final prototyping stage. It was one of the first ones where I felt that the code was autonomous enough to hit a sweet spot somewhere in the middle of all the different possible variations. Put another way, it was starting to make stuff I was vaguely chuffed with.
By the end of the process, there will be nearly 3000 lines of code, working with four different libraries of images.
Test printing
One of the last parts of developing “A Scheme Not Of This World” was the test printing. I spent a lot of time tinkering to get the colour to really sing out and I’m so pleased with the results.
This is one of the later test prints; there were a few further tweaks before I was happy with the settings. Each unique artwork is professionally gilceé printed on archival paper.


Test framing
As part of the test printing process for “A Scheme Not Of This World”, I framed some of the proofs to check how the artwork would look once on the wall. This is one of them, in a simple white mount.
First batch
This a photo of a few of the first batch of “A Scheme Not Of This World” prints, on sale in the shop. They’re packaged in acid-free cellophane bags for safe-keeping; orders will be sent out in environmentally-responsible cardboard packaging. The electricity powering the computer that runs the code is from 100% renewable sources.
Read more about A Scheme Not Of This World here, or browse prints from the collection in the shop.
Part 1 is here.

Posted by Alex Russell on 01 June 2021