GDV 2.3.1
Drawing with time
MyCodeHistory: 6 April 2014
This is the first program that you can use as a drawing tool. It’s based on a line that rotates around the mouse position. The joining of lines is based on the speed and direction of the mouse. In my case I was using a Wacom (pronounced ‘Wok-um’) Intuos 3 tablet and pen. With each pen-click the line length and color change. The rotation speed of the lines can be set with the left and right arrow keys on the keyboard. I must admit that there are enormous visual possibilities using this program. I was, for instance, able to create 91 different images with this tool. I tried to make the first image with the pen on the tablet. But that did not work. The pen is not stable enough to keep it on the same place during the drawing. So I replaced the pen by the Wacom mouse. And that worked very well. Position the mouse somewhere on the tablet and let the drawing tool do it’s work. For the second range of images I kept the mouse positioned on the same place and let it finish a complete circle. I increased the strokeWeight to 50 and added a random transparency between 5 and 10. If you hit the space bar you get a random color for each drawn object. I increased the strokeWeight again but now to 100 pixels. LineLength is now a random number between 10 and 350. I noticed that I did not use the keys to control the default colors. I mostly used the space bar to get a random color. This has a drawback because sometimes you get very dark and muddy colors. So I defined a color range in the program. But to get interesting images from this program you have to invest time. And that is going to be the case for all sketches that follow after this one.
In a few sketches I used the default .svg files that were in the data folder of the original program. I lowered the transparency level to 20. The size of the .svg file is randomly chosen between 50 and 200 pixels. The circles in the images are random positioned by hand. I decreased the AngleSpeed to 0.5. This makes the movements very slow but in return it gives a better image quality. And image quality is more important for me than time. Some sketches work with svg-files which I made in Adobe Illustrator. I have put them under the 6-key. Commented out the other keys (7, 8 and 9). And I replaced those with my own .svg files. I used Code Line’s Art Directors Toolkit 5i to precisely position the cursor in the images. When you are able to hold your mouse-cursor very still you can get undistorted glass-like images. In fact it is very difficult to keep the mouse straight at one point. That would be a good improvement for the program. This was a very fine session. I made a lot of images and I now have a better idea about how to make different images with this program.
In 2010 I bought the book Generative Gestaltung. It was in German so I translated all accompanied text of the programs into English. After that I tried to work with some programs but I did not have a clue what they were doing. Let alone how they worked. So I waited for the English version which I received in 2012. And in April 2014 I arrived at a point in the Generative Design book were I left it about two years ago. The difference is now that I understood 75% of the code. Sometimes I know what the program is doing and why things are working (or not when I have modified it). That is an improvement. Time is an important learning factor.
Matisse’s painting ‘Le Bateau’ hung upside down in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, for forty-seven days before anyone noticed it. In that period 116,000 people had visited the gallery. Henri Matisse, 1869–1954, French painter
Generative Design Variations
22