Art Diary: June 2021
Art Diary Number 1: June 2021
This is the first part of a new monthly series looking at the art I produce and publish on instagram. I started putting art on there last year, but put I decided I needed time to improve the code I use the generate all this art. Once I’ve finished adding new features and fixing problems, I’ll go back to publishing a new piece of art every day.
Animation
One of the big reasons I stopped publishing new art was I needed time to rewrite big parts of my code from the ground up to handle animations. This was a big paradigm shift and I had to go through a lot of code to make the change. I had to introduce the concept of frames, and give you control over what happens on each frame. It was a big job, but it’s well worth it to see animations are now supported naturally. The use of frames also gives you an easier way to control the order that things happen and lets you draw objects multiple times. These changes do more than just support animation. I’m really pleased with the result, so expect to see more animations popping up on my instagram page.
De Jong Attractors
I discovered the De Jong Family of attractors and I can’t wait to create more of these. You simply pick a point, and move it to a new point based on the x and y value. If you repeat this many times you can draw the point at everywhere it has been. Mysterious, beautiful and chaotic shapes known as strange attractors often emerge. For De Jong Attractors the formula for moving the point is as follows;
\(\displaystyle x = sin(a*y) – cos(b*x)\)
\(\displaystyle y = sin(c*x) – cos(d*y) \)
The parameters a, b, c and d can all be changed to give wildly different results. It’s a lot of fun to experiment and see what the result is.
Random Walks
Each line represents a single particle moving around randomly. I made each particle also drift in a preferred direction and start on a circle. This creates the underlying structure that complements the total randomness.
Notice that this piece and the last one both use the same colour for the background. I’m going to make this my default background colour going forward. It doesn’t distract from the art but makes it look more professional. I’m really pleased with the results.
Colour Schemes
Another colour scheme I experimented with is white-on-black. It’s very striking and works well with a Maurer rose. There were already a number of these on my instagram page before, but it looks so different with these colours. It’s amazing what effects you can get by just changing the colour.
Manipulating Shapes
I wrote a function that breaks a shape in half randomly. If you repeat this process you get a cracked glass effect. Because of the randomness, it looks different every time. The code I wrote isn’t perfect, but it turned out to make a very striking piece. I consider this a work in progress.
3D Graphics
My last picture is my first attempt at drawing three-dimensional images. It doesn’t look like much, but it does work, at least for wire mesh shapes. I need to add support for other objects and give you the ability to move the camera, but this is a good first step. Come back next month to see what progress I can make.