Art Diary: July and August 2022

I’m two months into the relaunch of my Instagram page. Read on to find out more.

What’s happening on my Instagram Page?

First I wanted to share one of my favourite pieces I have ever posted onto my instagram page. I love the colours, the symmetry and the contrast between the simplicity of the right and left hand sides with the chaos in the middle. I’ve made quite a few pieces like this but I think this is the most successful in the series. If you want to see more check out the free desktop wallpapers I made earlier in the year.

I’ve done some simple Voronoi diagrams in the past but now I’ve started to make them more complicated. Voronoi diagrams start with a series of random points and then colours in the diagram correspond to areas that are closest to each of the starting points. There are lots of ways you can tweak the process to get some stunning results. This is an example where I coloured the art by the ignoring the closest points and looking at the second closest distance. This makes for a really striking crystalline effect. I look forward to more experiments with Voronoi diagrams.

Black and White Fractals

These fractals are very similar to ones I have published before. However instead of using a smooth gradient of colour I used an alternating black and white colour scheme and it’s remarkable how different they look. It gives you a very different view of the fractal and showing where the most turbulent areas of the fractal are.

Wave Form Collapse

The wave form collapse algorithm is a way of procedurally generating images from inputs that represent typical images. The typical images generate rules for what can and can’t be each other. For example in the image below the red cells can only be next to other red cells or the dark orange cells. You cannot go from red to dark blue without transitioning through all the other colours. I must say I didn’t implement every aspect of the wave form collapse here. I wrote the rules myself instead of inferring them from other images and I don’t use any probability distribution to make some outcomes more likely than others. I also work through each cell in order from top to bottom, left to right, instead of using the probabilities to order the calculations. Still I’m very happy with the results I’ve been able to get so far.

The next three pieces use tiles with straight and curved lines on them. The rules simply say that the lines must all connect. Each of the three pictures uses a different tile-set. In this first one, lines can connect or crossover.

In this picture lines can crossover but not connect.

Finally in this picture lines can’t connect or crossover.

Moving into three dimensions

My biggest achievement in the last two months was finally getting the hang of a basic 3D shape. If you read my last Art Diary you’ll know that I was struggling with the faces on the back of the shape being drawn. Now only the faces that are facing the camera are drawn. This sounds simple but it took forever for me to get the hang of. The calculations are a little complicated and I had a couple of bugs in my code. These are resolved now and the hardest part is creating the shapes. Each triangle shown is a sequence of points and the order in which you describe the points determines whether the triangle is considered to be facing towards the camera or not. I need to get better at understanding this part of modelling before I can attempt more complicated shapes and designs. I also need to add the capability for handling multiple objects that can move in front of and behind each other. This is so much better than what I had before, but I still have much to do. I had planned on cleaning my package code to remove all the warnings you get when you build and install the package but getting this to work took a lot longer than I expected.