Anatomy of a Blob
Blobs are whimsical, unique, colorful, and sometimes even adorable--and to illustrate this, I've created a Blob generator using Processing. This program will render a unique Blob based on a few random attributes, including size, color, and which combination of five attributes it has. Be sure to take a Blob of your very own home with you today!
produced by: Jamie Sichel
About
In order to accomplish this Blob generator, I needed to first "draw" each Blob's asset. Using mostly bezier vertecies, I created a blob body and a few sets of ears, followed by the eyes. Once I had finished constructing those basic elements, I went about generating a blob with a random choice of each attribute. I then had it scale dynamically using noise--so every time you start the program, it will give you a different size and shaped blob, but each of its attributes will scale properly with it. This works because the shapes are drawn using points inside of Processing--so instead of scaling and warping an existing image, it draws it based on variables generated every time the program is started.
Unsatisfied with just eyes and ears, I added horns to the mix. This made each blob have a lot more character, but little personality. This is when I added expressive eyebrows and mouths. After I had generated a few blobs I felt that they lacked a little bit of visual depth, so I added filters within Processing. One is a "grunge" texture overlay, and the other is an overlay of a gradient. It's subtle but very much adds to the final image produced.
To create a poster I saved some of my favorite blobs and laid them out in the style of an old biology textbook.
