It turns out that adding noise to gradients is a really useful thing to do - so many new effects can be created with just a few additional parameters. Sadly, CSS and Canvas API gradients (linear, radial, conic) are very basic implementations (and SVG is not much more advanced).

Recently I did some work to add software gradient enhancements to my canvas library. Because these run on the CPU rather than GPU they're computationally intense, but still worth the effort just to see what can be done with different spreads (pad, repeat, reflect, transparent) and noise engine operations inserted while calculating stuff like gradient color selection, and pixel positioning.

Linear gradient demo test - https://scrawl-v8.rikweb.org.uk/demo/canvas-003.html

Author here. I wrote this many years ago (2017?) while exploring techniques to create art that I could put up on my walls :-) If you enjoyed this article there are more similar ones linked on the main page: https://sighack.com/

Very beautiful.

I am a complete newbie, so all comments, advice, pointers would be earnestly welcomed -- Does anyone know how some of these would relate to plotting random Polya vector fields ?

For example, one can take a sum of complex rational functions of the form

    f_i(z) = r_i / (z - p_i) 

where r,p are random complex numbers drawn from some point process.

One needs to plot the conjugate of sum_i f_i(z).

EDIT: so many lovely pages pointed to in the comments ! Mentioning a collective thanks to all rather than clutter this page with individual thanks.

@ttctciyf you are marked dead. Not sure why.

Great write up! I also dove in to this topic a while ago over at https://damoonrashidi.me/articles/flow-field-methods, but putting the live processing sketches in was a very nice touch! Good job, and nice outputs!

My old work using perlin noise https://a.tulv.in/noise-planets.html

This is awesome

some beautiful effects and good ideas. My favs are iterations 8, 20, 25