Pressed Frond
Three fronds of one bracken, laid on a sheet, strapped down with paper and named. One species to a sheet: that is what a determination means, and the first draft of this plate had a club-moss in the corner as a "detail", which is botanical nonsense on a Pteridium sheet. Nothing on it is plumb. A specimen is laid down by hand and pressed where it falls, so each frond sits at its own slight angle, and every one of them is strapped, because a specimen left floating is the thing that reads as wrong before you can say why. There is no green. A plant dried on a sheet for a century is brown, and the only other colour in the plate is the straw of the mounting strips.
Technique
this plate is the exception in the gallery. The other three series compute their whole picture in the sketch and let layers make every mark; here the sketch only lays the paper down, and the drawing is done by `plugin-plants` fern layers with `plugin-typography` for the label and `plugin-shapes` for the mounting strips. That is deliberate, and it is what the series is about: a herbarium sheet is not composed, it is a CONVENTION, so the layout is fixed and what the seed reaches is the growth of the plant. Change the seed and three different bracken plants are pressed onto the same sheet in the same places under the same label.
Seeds
The same system at three seeds. What moves is the surface and the marks describing it; the composition, the palette and the depth rule stay put.
21
604
1130
Layer stack
In paint order. Every mark in the image comes from these; there is no handwritten drawing code.
textures:paperSheetplants:fernSpecimen — Frondplants:fernSpecimen — Second Frondplants:fernSpecimen — Young Frondshapes:rectMounting Strip — Uppershapes:rectMounting Strip — Middleshapes:rectMounting Strip — Second Frondshapes:rectMounting Strip — Young Frondtypography:textAccession Numbertypography:textLabel — Determinationtypography:textLabel — Familytypography:textLabel — Collection
Source
The complete composition. Open it in GenArt to re-render, re-seed, or take it apart.
{
"genart": "1.2",
"id": "pressed-frond",
"title": "Pressed Frond",
"created": "2026-09-10T00:00:00Z",
"modified": "2026-09-10T20:31:22.816Z",
"renderer": {
"type": "canvas2d",
"version": "1.x"
},
"canvas": {
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"height": 1400
},
"parameters": [],
"colors": [],
"state": {
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"params": {},
"colorPalette": [
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"#4a3626",
"#7a6247",
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},
"algorithm": "// Hortus — the sheet only. This code draws NO specimen.\n//\n// The other three series in the gallery compute their whole picture here and\n// let layers make every mark. This one does not, and the difference is the\n// point of the series: a herbarium sheet is not composed, it is a CONVENTION.\n// The specimen goes where specimens go, the label goes where labels go, and\n// what varies between sheets is the plant, not the layout. So the layout is\n// fixed in the layer transforms and the growth of the specimen is what the\n// seed reaches.\n//\n// All this does is lay the paper down under everything else.\nfunction sketch(ctx, state) {\n ctx.fillStyle = state.colorPalette[4];\n ctx.fillRect(0, 0, state.canvas.width, state.canvas.height);\n}\n",
"layers": [
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},
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"id": "accession",
"type": "typography:text",
"name": "Accession Number",
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"fontFamily": "Georgia",
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},
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"text": "Dry heath, north slope\nalt. 240 m\ncoll. E. T. Carter\n14 September",
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}