Drawing on Ink Drops
"Drawing on Ink Drops" is a semi-generative digital drawing focussing on the use and contrast of fluid movement and layered drawn primative shapes
produced by: William Parry
Introduction
This generative drawing project was created with the intent to be projection mapped across three cubes over three minutes. Because of this, the generative drawing is forever changing, layering and erasing itself through the use of different block color shapes to 'refresh the canvas'. The piece implements visually contrasting digital drawing techniques in order to create an unusual, yet slightly pleasing layered collage of primative shapes.
Concept
The main concept behind my computational image piece was making use of pixels to draw, leaving a trail without a repetitive full screen block colour as an erase. Using primitive shapes and 'outter space' like visuals in this piece has been influenced by abstract artworks by Kandinsky, mainly his work “Several Circles”.
Technical
There are three main components or ‘brushes’ to the overall displayed image.
· Rotating Lines
· Ink Blobs
· Curves
The Rotating lines make use of one line being rotated around a point, this creates a wheel spoke like image when static, once mobile the lines increase in length and are translated across screen controlled by a varying noise amount, creating a spiralling affect. There are different instances of the rotation lines, varying the degree in noise, this creates star like shapes, to more subtle spiralling helix like brush strokes.
‘Ink Blobs’ are added into the piece as a way of containing the otherwise hectic composition, adding a ghosting effect to the curves and the lines, then acting as a back colour for the rest of the drawing to commence. The blobs acting as a foreground element follow the rotating lines around the image to emphasise the sense of motion within the composition. The blobs ghosting qualities help influence the contrast between the fluid movements of foregrounded curves against the overdrawn background curves.
Arrays of bezier curves are added into the composition as a form of juxtaposition to the otherwise sense of urgency within the piece. The curves were influenced by a sketch I had seen on openprocessing.org ‘bezier + lissajus’ by tinfoil_powers.
Throughout the piece the selection of colours are constantly changing through the use of colour ‘lerping’. This helped as an extra element of generation, especially once the ‘lerp’ feature hits the end of its cycle, as the colour drastically changes creating a strobing effect once scenes are changed over or a new element is added to the composition.
As the piece was to be projection mapped repeatedly for three minutes over four hours on to three cubes, the three distinct elements to this piece are randomly selected at a time between five and twenty seconds to create multiple different compositions, every time the projection is initialised.
Future development
To develop the piece I’d like to introduce a further exploration into the creation of abstract art, specifically Kandinsky’s systematic approach to composition, choice of colour, lines and angles. Coming from a computer music background, programming for visual arts is a very new and interesting realm, and one that I could definitely adapt to computationally through Kandinskys systematic approach to composing abstractions in visual artworks.
Self evaluation
The Bezier curves worked well against the “ink drops”, this worked well with the concept due to the creation of contrast between the refreshed animated fluid motion against the continuously drawn curves.
There was a heavy use of noise and randomness within the piece, this I felt created a rather cheap appearance to the overall composition and division of frames. This could have been resolved by using a form of mathematical recursion to determine compositional and scale, and color values, something I have been exploring in other projects.
As this project was an exploration into different drawing techniques I noticed myself adding sometimes too many elements into one scene. Whilst these can be complementary in some scenes, in others the composition can soon become over populated and messy.
References
bezier + lissajus - OpenProcessing. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/445137. [Accessed 11 January 2018].
Kandinsky. W (1926) Several Circles [Paint On Canvas].
Holtzman, S., 1994. Digital Mantras. 1st ed. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT.