“The Math.” project
This is my very first experiment and the project in creative coding. Before getting my hands dirty with a code, I’ve done a quick search in Google for generative art resources and found this article from Google top about generative art https://aiartists.org/generative-art-design.
I wanted to find useful tools which can do all work for me to generate valuable or not-so-valuable art pieces with a click of a button. Despite the promising title “Examples, Software and Tools to Make Algorithm Art” the article appears to be rich for examples, but not rich for tools. Actually, the list of suggested tools looks very humble:
Wait! WHAT? Instead of having a list of ready-to-use commercial titles with bells and whistles, the best what we have today is a list of libraries and frameworks, in a DIY manner. And looking at the list of programming languages on which those tools are built, I see quite exotic and/or not-so-easy to start languages, for example, C++, Rust, Clojure, and Kotlin. Gosh, do you know how much time do you need to compile a blank project with C++ with an attached C++ library and make it fly? Well, if you have tens of years of experience in C++ maybe it is a piece of cake for you. But what if not. My software engineering background does not include any of those languages, unfortunately. I come from the .NET world and honestly saying I had no wish to start learning any of those languages before getting to make art. I just wanted to start making art immediately!
So, as we can see, although generative art exists for more than 50 years already (I believe the first works dated in the 60s), there is not much user-friendly software around for generative artists still. The most advanced language and IDE for generative art and creative coding today is Processing. It has C-like syntax and it should be fairly easy for everyone who programs with C-like language to get the grasp and unleash creativity.
For my first shot I decided not to jump on Processing, but stay with what I know the best and see what I can build using that. So my choice was C# and GDI+ and visualization library. I have some old and simple algorithm I made years ago that moves and rotates points around using simple sin and cos computations, with a lot of randomnesses. I implemented the algorithm and got to the most fun part of creative coding — hit the “Run” button and watch the figures appear on the screen.
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First visualizations looked bland and uninspiring. But a little bit of tweaking and playing with linear gradients brought more interesting results. Finally, I got something looking like this figure:
Errhg. Still is far away from art that can impress. The figure is drawn with plain lines (Graphics.DrawLine). Then I also tried to replace lines with a path and draw it as one. It appears GDI+ can not extend linear gradient along the path in direction of movement from point to point. When we draw a path in GDI+ with a linear gradient, the best it can do is to paint the whole figure according to the gradient. This looks even worse:
Rather a generative junk than art. Okay, rollback.
So then I played a little bit more and collected a few more shapes that looked more or less OK. And pushed the project to Behance(https://www.behance.net/gallery/133837969/The-Math).
I also played with images in a graphical editor and checked how does it look if I shift(rotate) hue. Suddenly, those shapes look better in yellow and green shades. It is a more eye-catching look for me.
I finished having shapes like this:
As for me, they are more appealing than figures in bluish and reddish tints. I stopped at this point, took a break, and started to think about how I can improve an outcome.
After a while, I managed to drastically improve coloring and made “The Math Neon” collection.
