The inspiration for this art piece came from cherry blossoms in Japan. My friend was telling me stories of when she visited and how beautiful, peaceful, and calming being around the blossoms felt for her. While exploring generative art online, I also came across examples of flow fields that captured a similar sense of beauty. I liked one of the examples and decided to integrate that idea with the concept of cherry blossoms.
For this piece, I try to mimic the nature of cherry blossoms and recreate that positive, calming environment around them. Each circle in this artwork represents a blossom, drifting softly in circular motion like petals swaying in a spring breeze. They begin large and vivid, then slowly shrink, mirroring the delicate, short-lived bloom of cherry trees that peak for only a brief moment before fading. Because cherry blossoms symbolize new beginnings and fresh starts, every click becomes a moment of renewal. The background’s soft pink hue further evokes this atmosphere.
One challenge I faced while creating this artwork was drawing the circular path of motion. At first, I wasn’t sure how to model this in p5.js. After some research, I discovered that sine and cosine functions could be used to trace circular paths, and I learned how to increase the angle gradually to animate the motion. Another challenge was resizing the blossoms: initially, all my circles shrank to a fixed diameter of 20, but I wanted each to reduce to a random size. To solve this, I introduced a targetSize variable, which allowed each blossom to shrink smoothly to its own unique final size.
In the future, I would like to add gradual color transitions. Specifically, I imagine the blossoms changing from colorful hues to red, where red represents the fading or “death” of the blossoms. I think this would add another poetic layer to the theme of impermanence.