I moved on from the brush stroke and started to work on a set of drawing functions that incorporate the stroke.

Currently coverage:

• moveTo,
• lineTo,
• rect,
• circle

the moveTo function is necessary since the dynamics of the brush motion would depend on the last stroke, both position and speed.

currently i’m working on the curve function, it’s quite a challenge to get the brush movement natural enough and calculation is also dependent on the stroke length and brush size too. once this is done I think all basic drawing functions are covered for now and I will move onto the composition stage.

this is a simple test:

stroke update from Liangjie Xia on Vimeo.

The machine draws with dripping ink, which is loaded into the cup and slowed down by the sponge.

The machine draws while the movable paper holder is pushed, leaving passive trails on the paper.

Then I made some simple line drawings:

The goal of the brush I think is to give computer generated line drawing a human feeling, even they are just coming from a series of drawing instructions. It is a little bit different than vector graphics + brush shapes, because in this case the speed of the moving brush tip does affect the look. No pressure input is required, because it is not designed to be used with a wacom tablet or anything, but purely computer generated lines. By playing with the thickness and shades of the lines, it is possible also to get depth and lighting, but that should be left for the composition stage, and I will see if it’s necessary to build more brush types for it.

Some ITP folks contributed some drawings too:

by Li Li

by Matt Richard

My next step would be building a set of (helper) api that uses this brush to draw, and to certain extent automate a drawing process. I’ve been experiencing some performance issue trying to isolate the drawing with PGraphics in processing from directly drawing to the screen. Not sure if I should learn a bit more OpenGL or go directly to openFrameworks for future development.

Erik Natzke‘s generative drawing in Flash

Game Is Over from Erik Natzke on Vimeo.

manual mouse input + flash actionscript

Craig Mullins‘ digital painting

CCTV Ink TV Commercial – Directed by Niko Tziopanos

CCTV Ink TV Commercial – Directed by Niko Tziopanos from Troublemakers.tv on Vimeo.

proposal

I would like to create a generative piece that would be able to compose something similar to Natzke’s gesture drawing but with limited manual input. The goal is not to imitate traditional drawing in textures and strokes, but I do think I can learn from the lighting technique we see in a lot of Mullins’ works. It has to be apparently digital however I would like to try coding emotions into the piece. It would be a too ambitious project for one semester, but I have some smaller starting points to work from.

The final form of the machine should be an automated computer program living on the web. It feeds on its own observation and produces one drawing everyday and publishes it to the web. This process is not to mimick evolution nor to develop artificial intelligence, it would be just another representation of myself, since I would code it not to be a general purpose drawing machine that draws everything perfectly, but to draw in a style similar to myself.

It contains apparently a lot of different components requiring totally different background knowledge. I guess I will starting with building a custom stroke module that is more responsive to the gesture, the ink ad could be a nice example of such behavior. I’m not crazy about this ink effect, but it serves a good reference for the fine controls that I would probably need to build into the system.

Form Study:

1. Place one (large) drop of ink on a piece of paper;

2. Tilt the paper to push the ink towards the other corner of the paper but keep the ink from the edge of the paper;

Contour Studies