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I spent some time earlier in the week refining the drawing algorithm even further, focusing on color palette selection and line weight distribution. I think I’m getting closer to something the produces pretty consistent results.

My next step — or perhaps experiment — will be to create some color palettes based on actual color fields that I produce using real paint or some other image source. I want finer control and intention over the possible color palettes, and while toxiclib’s color utilities are pretty amazing, I’m finding that the ColorRange constraints produce less-than-desirable results most of the time (too much or too little saturation and brightness at undesirable moments).

Here’s a demo of the Processing app so you can see the renders in realtime:

And here is some more hi-res output from the app:

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+ View the piece on Flickr.

Thing learned tonight: the quality of your materials matters. Period.

+ View the piece on Flickr.

This is from last night’s life drawing session at The Stables. It was a 1.5 hour pose. I feel like I did a pretty good job of hitting the likeness, but I was really pissed at the quality of my charcoal and paper. Looks like it’s time to ditch the crap I’ve been using.

+ View it large!

Here’s a continuation of the Line Sketching post I did last week. What you’re seeing here are larger, higher-resolution renders that use a further-tweaked drawing algorithm, concentrating more on form and color.

The key to these pieces is seeing them in their native resolution. There’s so much texture and pseudo-form that emerges from subtle shifts in a single line over time. Here’s an example:

Full View

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Detail View

I need to continue tweaking the drawing routine and color choices before I’ll be happy enough to take these to a printer. Also, I’m going to be sticking any additional interesting output from this thing into a Flickr set called “Line Topography”.

In the mean time, here are some interesting ones that came out of the last 50 renders I did yesterday:

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+ View the piece on Flickr.

So I’ve been feeling less than creative and less than productive for the past 45 days or so. Yesterday I realized I needed to make something even if it was crappy.

Examining some of the recent things I’ve been inspired by and even some of my older posts here, I drew upon the following line-heavy references as my starting point:

• visp Output Sample 001 (from 2007)
• “flow” from Merdan Agayev
• “line drawing, unstable/uneven surfaces: carpet”
• All the work of Jean-Pierre Hébert

I’m in love with line. I’m especially in love with really dense linework that yields faux-3D forms and false topographies.

So I jumped right into Processing with a simple idea:

1. Let the user pick a horizontal line of pixels from camera input.
2. Analyze those pixels, deriving an array of values based on pixel brightness.
3. Create a vector line whose peaks and troughs are based on this array of values.
4. Use a bunch of Math.random() and Perlin noise and magic to draw this line on the screen from top-to-bottom.

Four hours later, interesting stuff started coming out. I’m making heavy use of GSVideo for camera input and toxiclibs for Perlin noise and color.

My goals for the end of the week will be to finesse the color logic, have the “input” line morph through two or three forms throughout the process of the render, and do some post-processing in Photoshop to get the colors to unify even further. I want to make some large prints. I think I also want to do a couple hand-drawn renditions based on some of the digital output.

Here are some more Instagram’ed crops from the first wave of output:

+ View the drawing on Flickr.

Drawn tonight at the semi-weekly life drawing session at The Stables. This drawing took about an hour and a half, which totally flew by. I’ve been trying to focus on measuring during the last couple sessions, and this is the first time a decent drawing and likeness came out of it. I’ve seriously been away from drawing habitually for too long.

Just gotta get back into a schedule for creating.

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Finally we’ve arrived at the final image to be used for the album art of Mode7‘s upcoming EP “Dusk Drops” (see above). There were a lot of contenders, but in the end, this image satisfied a certain visual balance and the general feeling of ominousness that we were looking to convey.

For these final renders, 2850×2850 images were generated by Sunflow, using the special Thinlens camera which allowed me to simulate a shallow depth of field. Each image took about 12 hours to render on a quad-core Intel i5 Windows 7 box.

Further post-processing was done in Photoshop to simulate things that we’d see in traditional photography: vignetting, chromatic abberation, and a subtle level of visual noise. Some color tweaking and other manipulations were done as well just to make the images a bit richer.

For the CD label itself, we’re going to use the following image:

+ View the piece on Flickr.

And then there were a few more images that I decided to render and treat, just because they were compelling to me and I wanted to see what they’d look like if I took them through the entire process.

+ View the piece on Flickr.

+ View the piece on Flickr.

+ View the piece on Flickr.

I’ll be following this post up with a video demoing the Processing app that I created for generating these compositions once they EP has been officially released in a few days.

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This is acrylic. It’s in a Moleskine (hence the weird paper crumple). I haven’t actually tried painting with acrylics in I-don’t-know-how-many years. And it’s the only kind of painting that I have some level of comfort with. You can thank my Color Theory class at SCAD for that.

I’m going to take this study and do an actual canvas. It’s probably going to be pretty bad. Can’t wait.

Back from the Eyeo Festival in Minneapolis, I’ve taken a stab at making my final set of selects from the numerous compositions I generated last week.

After the last post, I went in and tweaked a couple of parameter ranges and how the noisy terrain was rendered and generated another 3,500 compositions, which you can see here:

+ See it super large on Flickr.

After the computer churned these out, I spent a few hours looking through them and managed to cull the set down to an even 350. But as I mentioned before, the next step was to render these using Sunflow, which I did right before I left for Minneapolis. Rendering the 350 images at 1280×1280 with no anti-aliasing and a very low sample setting took about 29 or so hours on a quad-core Intel PC. I had it dumping the output into a Dropbox folder so I could check on the progress on my phone during my trip.

Tonight, I took the next step and chose a final set of 29 images that are contenders for the final render. In that render, the visual noise will fall away considerably, and I’ll be generating a 2850×2850 image suitable for a 300dpi CD cover print.

You can see the 29 images I picked in this Flickr set. As of right now, these are my five favorite renders:

+ View the piece on Flickr.

+ View the piece on Flickr.

+ View the piece on Flickr.

+ View the piece on Flickr.

+ View the piece on Flickr.