Design by Programming

Processing is a script language with which it is relatively easy to generate colors, shapes and interactivity.

For a start I created shapes like rectangles, ellipses and triangles to design an abstract landscape. I took a sheet of quad-ruled paper and looked for the coordinates I needed to place the shapes on the screen. The colors I find with the help of a color selector, that is provided by the processing interface.

Now I had all the information I needed to create my first Processing sketch.

Here I imagine a landscape with a planet (moon, sun) and a triangle which moves through the landscape.

The next step in sketching with Processing was to let a shape be drawn by the program within a loop. I also added randomness for the colors and for the coordinates of the shapes.

My intention was to contrast splintering (triangles) with entirety (circles). This can be a symbol for, for example, an immigrant family contrasted to a native family.



The last step with my first experience with Processing was interactivity and by that generative design.

The interactive part of my script provides the possibility to drag the mouse button over the screen and this way to display thin bars.

The stroke and the fill color of the bar is chosen according to the position on the screen. You also can clear the screen with any key and by that generate a new background color, again depending on the mouse position.

This way you can partly control the process, but because of the complexity of the procedure most people may try to generate a stripe design by "playing around". Look the following examples,

I intended to give the possibility to create playfully ones own space, but you can also use it to design a nice pattern of stripes.


and here the genesis of the last example.



Blogger does not provide the possibility of running Processing within this post, but here is the example I used as a basis for creating my sketch.



This post was inspired by an art online course:

Introduction to Computational Arts   

Just Three Colors for Any Hue or Yellow from Green and Red

This essay which compares subtractive and additive mixing of colors I wrote as an introduction assignment of an art online course.

This is a color wheel painted with oil paint. I used the three colors on the bottom of the painting to mix all the colors you can see. Now compare to a color wheel I have created while using light.

 

Note that the light colors are generally clearer. Note also that some of these colors are difficult to achieve with paint, for example the cyan blue just below the west direction. It is not for nothing that some artists decide to make artwork while using light, which gives the work something non-material.

I achieved this creation in Gimp an open source image editing software. When selecting a tool which uses color you can determine the color you need. You can do this by adjusting the values for the three color red, green and blue (RGB). For any color you can use values from 0 to 255. To mix yellow you need the highest values from green and red.

 

While watching the technique videos I realized I am still not tired being occupied with the color wheel. I loved watching the video where Anna Divinsky showed how to blend any hue from just three colors. I bought three oil paintings and tried myself.

An additional motivation for this post is that I am not only interested in traditional artwork but also in digital artwork. I remembered that there are two different ways of blending colors, the subtractive mixing of colors with paint and the additive mixing of color with light. The most intriguing fact for me was that when using light you can mix yellow from green and blue.

This also presents part of my past, where as a young woman I decided to become an engineer of physical techniques. We learned a lot about light and also about chemistry which is paint at its roots. These days I rarely combine artwork with my technical knowledge, but I thought to introduce myself this might be O.K.

Yet, is this really artwork?

Yes, it is and I hope you got the message right, which is artwork must not be extremely original like many people think, it can be just an interesting presentation of the color wheel.

I am really glad that no one can give me any grade for this claim :)



Yellow Submarine

3D modelling and animation is rather interesting to me. I've already learned a lot about the 3D tool Blender, but mostly created after tutorials, which makes it not unique enough to present it as personal artwork. Then again I have also personal 3D creations, which but are quite simple. 3D needs a lot of knowledge of the tool until you are able to deliver convincing 3D design. Still, I want to post sometimes something when I think it might be interesting to others, too.

I start with a work after a tutorial, which resulted in an animated gif of a yellow submarine.

Click here for the tutorial.

I went through the tutorial, but the result seemed too mechanical and like a plastic model. I've already changed the form and colors after my taste and ability, but in addition I've applied a posterize filter in a video editing software to make it look better designed. I saved the work as single images and in Gimp created the animated gif.

I like the gif because it looks like a mysterious story about a long journey with a peaceful submarine.