SDL2025-G01C01-I43 Eyeflower

Item Identity: SDL2025-G01C01-I43

Title: Eyeflower

Artist: Sam Diellor Luani

Collection: SDL InnerSpace Origins

Section: Vector Vintage

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A cartoonish eye-mouth bloom—born from a black “splash stain” and elevated into SDL InnerSpace lore.

A flat, hand-drawn vector of a red, jagged splash silhouette housing a single green-irised eye that doubles as a mouth. Beige and purple tentacle-like appendages radiate outward. The eyelid’s lower lip is softly beveled, hinting at a smile. Signed with the signature SDL.

The Eyeflower: A Rediscovered 1996 Vector for SDL InnerSpace

This image is a last-minute addition to the SDL InnerSpace Origins, rescued from forgotten archives. It was sketched in 1996 in Macromedia Flash and Micrografx Designer, from a bad raster, a poorly rendered splash stain, which I filled with black, because the colors and the resulting texture had turned out so bad. I vectorized it, and that is the black outline around the image. A couple of days later, I edited it in Flash, where I had trace-bitmapped it, and drew the first sketch of the flower, the central orange shape, not as a free-hand or curve drawing, but as a “cloud” of many circular shapes merged into one circular cellular shape. The sketch was edited further, with fine node tuning, and completed in Micrografx Designer.

Conceptually, this is my foundational “mouth-eye flower,” a personal emblem combining eye and mouth to signal human sentience and conscience within SDL InnerSpace’s formal theory. I’ve used this motif since childhood—initially inspired by a documentary on carnivorous plants—so the red evoke a connection to meat, and green appears only in the iris, to create a predator-like impression.

Everything in the composition remains flat except for the lower eyelid, which I beveled when integrating the artwork into the PowerPoint document of SDL InnerSpace Origins. This slight three-dimensional touch should underscore the duality of sight and speech, emphasizing the smile on the eye’s “mouth.”

As the germ of my long-running “botanoid predator” series, this doodle marks the inception of countless surreal, sentient plant-like creatures.

The reason I saved that bad splash, was that I saw that it could be used as a composition for my Eyeflower.