New artwork: The Gathering of Israel. For a few months I’d been thinking about how to symbolically represent this idea and eventually settled on a vector field (with artistic license rashly taken) as the best fit, at least for this version. The textures all generated in SVG via a small Python script.
Blog: #svg
Links #41
Rob Weychert’s Plus Equals, a new zine about algorithmic art. The first issue was good, looking forward to future installments.
Riccardo Scalco’s Textures.js, SVG patterns for d3.js. Yum. I don’t even use d3 (at least not right now), but I’m tempted to do something with it just so I can use these.
Jason Kottke on the invention of a new pasta shape. Max sauceability as a concept will stick with me for a long time, I think.
Rytis Bieliunas on some of the darker corners of Go (the programming language). I’m writing a lot of Go at work now and this was helpful.
Austin Kleon on blogging as a forgiving medium. The idea of continually editing and refining posts after publishing them intrigues me. I fix typos if I find them, but that’s about it at the moment.
A short update on Cirque:
I took out the turbulence filters, because they shouldn’t have been there in the first place (at least not the way I had them). Instead, I’m planning to build a tool that makes it easy to apply filters to SVG elements. It’ll be more generally useful, since the SVG input won’t have to have come from Cirque.
Manually placing circles is partway done. (Placing them works; editing and deleting them is next on the list.)
I’m also refactoring to clean things up and to make the imperative code more functional where I can.
Introducing Cirque
As schoolwork starts to wind down, I’m finally starting to make progress on the creativity tools and HCI explorations I talked about back in September. This week I’ve also realized that graphical tools for art and design are what I want to focus most on. (I do still intend to explore textual interfaces, but they’re on the backburner for now.)
In the spirit of working in public, then, Cirque is a small WIP web app I’m building for making patterns via circle packing:
This is very much a rough initial MVP. You can tweak some settings, generate new patterns using a simple circle-packing algorithm, and export SVG (with the turbulence/displacement filters enabled by default), but that’s it. Some of the features I’m planning to build next:
- Replace the settings text box with, you know, good UI (I’m also excited to explore color picker design here)
- Add the ability to manually place both circles and anticircles (so artists are able to create intentional negative space)
- Add a way to programmatically set the circle colors (probably via something like shaders, so you could say all circles smaller than a certain size get one color and the rest get another, or circle color is dependent on position or something else)
I’ve also thought about moving the circle packing code from JavaScript to Rust, to be able to play around with WebAssembly, but it seems overkill, at least at this point. (Instead I think I’ll plan to Rust and WebAssembly on the graphical type design tool I want to build.)
New artwork: Peace, Be Still. I dialed up the SVG turbulence filters to get the effect on the left. Also used the erode operator throughout (with the feMorphology filter primitive). I couldn’t get Inkscape to show the lines with the filters applied, though, so I ended up screenshotting the piece via QuickLook and then upscaling in Photoshop (hacky, but hopefully not too obvious).
New artwork: The Night Shall Not Be Darkened. On this one I used an erosion filter along with turbulence and displacement; the effect is most clear on the two vertical lines.
Playing around with generative orthogonal cubes, just for fun (which probably means I’m avoiding my actual schoolwork, now that I think about it):
I wrote a Python script to generate the cubes as SVG polygons and then went through my usual filter/texture routine.
A few other new pieces: Nothing Shall Be Impossible unto You (about faith), Roll Forth (about the stone cut out of the mountain without hands), and Out of the Dust (about the Book of Mormon).
For a while I’ve wanted to explore using black and white for my art. Tell Me the Stories of Jesus was the initial step in that direction, but these latest four pieces are more like what I envisioned (a little more like ink on paper, to some degree). I’m looking forward to doing more work in this style.
New artwork: Tree of Life II.
I used the same circle packing technique to generate the circles, constraining them this time to be inside a larger circle. Initially I was going to have the tree visible as that larger circle — dark on a light background — but it ended up looking better to me with just the small white circles. (After that I used SVG filters and Inkscape and Photoshop as usual.)
New artwork: Plan of Salvation. Inspired by a comment my friend Naomi made about another piece.
This is also one of the first times (maybe the very first time) that I’ve superimposed things like this, especially out of chronological order. Hopefully it doesn’t make the piece overly confusing.
Last but not least, I’m really liking the SVG filters for making the edges seem more hand-drawn.