lithium flowers bloom » drawing

Automating The Brush Stroke

L.J — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:40:40 +0000

Here’s a rough diagram of the drawing machine architecture that I have in mind. I’m building the components from bottom to top.

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.

A Passive Drawing Machine

L.J — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:06:15 +0000

worked on this simple drawing machine a couple of month ago but never got it posted.

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.

Update on my brush stroke

L.J — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:35:22 +0000

following up my drawing machine project proposal, I built a brush stroke in the first week to simulate what a brush should behave in my imagination. Basically I built it with the idea of simulating chinese calligraphy (without the splashing ink part) so first it should be used for writing, and it came out pretty much as what I expected.

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.

Extended Study

L.J — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:16:18 +0000

I found this ref photo on ffffound for extended drawing study

Gestures and Form

L.J — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 19:57:08 +0000

Gesture Studies on the street:

Form Study:

line and contour

L.J — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 16:24:43 +0000

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

Magnetic Tracer

L.J — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 07:05:52 +0000

At week 1 of toy design class, I grouped with Emeri, Elie and EJ and quick prototyped a drawing toy over the weekend. After ruling out a lot of other possibilities of making a drawing toy like miniature catapult loaded with chalk powder or rolling marbles spitting ink, we came back to the idea of using magnets to recreate the “magic” of the invisible. The small drawing table comes with a set of different figurines holding different types of pens/sharpies/markers. Each of the figurines has magnets embedded at the bottom and kids could use the magnetic handles under the hood to move the figurines on the table to leave traces on the paper.

The table

Figurines

Side pockets to hold markers and figurines and accessories

I missed the material class last semester but still I really wanted to play with molds and plastic casting. So I took the chance to teach myself and tried to make a toy giraffe and a small volcano. Lots of failures encountered, I could never completely get rid of the tiny bubbles in the mold. Yet a lot of fun too!