I’m excited to share today’s image generated from the application under development:
It’s a pretty organic background-pattern sort of texture, but it highlights a few cool things about the app, which is focused on creating beautiful images with mathematical techniques.
First, the brush strokes! All of these strokes are ‘points’ drawn with an extra-wide calligraphy nib setting. The app has many more brush-stroke capabilities, from illustration brushes to random pixel scatters to custom-defined patterns or images.
Second, the organic curves and changing brush angles – these are generated by trig functions! The image is built from a simple cartesian plot of the function cos(3*x) + x – you can see its general shape in the undulating bands that ascend to the right. A repeater is added to re-draw the function several times, adding a little to the Y-axis position each time – so we get lots of plots drawn one above the other.
But what about the changing angles of the brush strokes? They’re also a function of changing something on each repeated drawing – in this case, we add a small angle delta (0.2, in radians) to the brush angle for each new pass.
Finally the color is another repeater setting, and it shows a cool feature of the app – any parameter change during repeated drawing can be applied as an expression that calculates the delta, rather than as a constant. In this case, we assign the color brightness delta to the expression sin(iteration)/4 – so the brightness of the brush color cycles up and down by 25% increase or decrease in successive passes.
Here’s a screenshot showing the settings in place to draw this picture, including the repeater controls (just hooked up to the GUI today!)
Much more coming soon! Meanwhile, here are a few alterations of this image, just shifting brush and background color but leaving the model and repeaters as they are:
