Art Diary: August 2021

This month saw some big cosmetic changes to my Instagram page, a new printer, and I discovered some really cool new types of art. Read on to find out more.

Buying a printer

Last month I mentioned I wanted a second printer. I was talking about in the far future, but I couldn’t help myself. I just really wanted to see my art in a picture frame, so here we are.

The picture quality of the printer is really good. Here is a closer look at the type of art I put in the frame. Look out for more of this on my instagram page next month.

When I tried to create borderless art I found my code to do this wasn’t as elegant as I would like it to be. The process of doing this led to more changes.

Relaunching my Instagram page

Having reworked the code for formatting my art, I decided to update the borders I use on Instagram. Here’s an example.

The black border is now much thicker but the border uses less space. The actual art is now bigger and more prominent. Unfortunately the new look clashed with my old style, so I decided to delete all my old artwork and re-upload it all. This meant taking another hiatus which I had been trying to avoid but the effect was worth it.

I also added more hashtags to each piece. I find the hashtag system on Instagram really inelegant and crass, but hopefully doing this will help more people find my art. Another change is that all my pieces of art get numbered when I post them on Instagram. It makes it much easier for me to reference previous pieces when I post a variation of another design and if someone sees a piece called Design Number 60, they know I have more art to check out.

Rotating Sine Waves

This is one of my favourite pieces of art I have produced so far. It’s really simple. I just took a truncated sine wave and rotated it around a point. This simple formulaic process creates a really complex shape that feels organic. I’m really looking forward to experimenting with this idea and trying out new ideas.

Pride String

My art doesn’t usually represent anything in particular, but this time I tried experimenting with making a rainbow pride flag and it worked really well. I like that this design is a lot more interesting than just some coloured rectangles but you still get the full range of colours. I also used a new R package for the colours and I’m going to be using this for rainbows going forward. The yellow is balanced with the other colours. A lot of R packages gave me a yellow that was so bright the lines become indistinguishable from the white background.

Celtic Knots

I have always had problems with my Celtic knots. The thickness of the knots was always calculated incorrectly and the thickness would change depending on the angle of the ribbon. I realised I had to do some more trigonometry to fix my code. On a thin knot like this, the difference is small but it looked really bad on thick knots. I’m really happy to have solved this problem as it had been tormenting me for a long time.

Geodes

My final new piece this week hasn’t appeared on my Instagram page yet, but I’m really excited about it. This piece of art alternates between two different styles and I love the contrast between them. I wanted some colour, and some lines, but not too much of either. Balancing the two works really well and creates a more complex piece than just having one or the other in isolation. I’m really happy with the result and I’m already experimenting with variations on this theme.