Trying to turn corners | Generative art diary
Succeeding in some arenas and not in others. Contains sparkly watercolours!!
I write about generative art, code, creativity and other interconnected topics. You can expect a diary every Friday sharing what I’ve been working on, some things I’ve found interesting, and links to my longer articles. Thanks for joining me here. 💖
Hello!
I’m still quite stretched between freelance work and family and art, but the strugglebus trundles onwards and progress has been made. The sun has definitely helped, and I’ve been trying to make it out for walks in the morning before starting work. I have succeeded maybe 20% of the time. As ever, I am doing my best.
I think I have been turning a bit of a corner with the diagrams, where the code is feeling more robust. I felt trepidation about getting back into it but, more and more, I’m finding that problems are easy to identify and solve because the way I have set things up makes sense. Obviously I’m always trying to set things up to make sense but sometimes the sensible way doesn’t become clear until you’ve tried a few less than ideal ways. (Perhaps a lesson???)
Things I’ve done this week
Diagram integration and aesthetics
I’ve now got the handwriting set up with four different diagram styles (venn, geometric, segmented circles, networks).
I spent some time adjusting the aesthetics of the line weights and styles. I have this “natural line” class, which handles all the creation and drawing of lines. So it takes 2 points, a path, or a point + rad, and a bunch of settings, and then creates a natural looking line that wobbles a little bit using Perlin noise, and can have varied width. I’m using it all over the place in these diagrams.
I also integrated curved words. This involved a little bit more angle-wrangling to get the words to appear properly centre aligned. It’s always a faff with angles because of the crossover from 360° to 0°. If a segment goes from 10° to 100° then we can simply do (a+b)/2 = 55° to find the centre point, but if a segment goes from 350° to 30°, then figuring out the centre point takes extra steps, otherwise the word ends up on the opposite side of the circle.
In the networks diagram style, I still have some work to do on the aesthetics, but I wanted to show you there is a thing with curving words in different directions. In the circle diagrams (above) it feels okay for words to sometimes be upside down, but it would be weird to write upside down on an arrow in the network diagrams (below). In flipping them, the letters have to curve the other way. For example, the word “intelligences” is curved in the opposite direction to the word “spaces”.
It’s another whole angle/rotation faff and, while figuring this out, I think I discovered a bug in the way I had been rotating letters. It was causing problems at the very centre of my spiral outputs, where the rotations are extreme. You might have noticed in most of those outputs last week, the spiral was starting a little way out from the centre, which was because words weren’t acting correctly at small radii, but I’ve fixed this.
The radius still only increases at the end of each word, so if the spiral starts with a long word in the middle, it will spiral around onto itself. But that’s a problem for another time.
Here’s one more generative diagram example
I’m super happy this is progressing and only wish I had more time in each week. I’m working on implementing handwriting and the other updates into the other styles and then I’m excited to add in more details around the sides and amp up the chaos.
A few watercolours
I feel like I have learnt new things about the watercolour medium from using them with my plotter, so it’s really fun to go in by hand and experiment.
Perhaps I would be more respected as an artist if I did not use glitter pens on everything, but I strive to live in accordance with my most authentic self and thus here we are.
Things I’ve enjoyed this week
Deniz demonstrated how the Physarum algorithm works, with adorable animations.
This diagram of ‘all of space and time’ by Carl Sagan, particularly the Forbidden Zone.
Here’s a fun image stretchy glitchy code thing, by bruno.
That’s it, thanks again for joining me!
I’ll leave you with another cool plant, and I’ll see you here next week.
- Amy ⭐
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