Spring 2018
One of the major challenges that really frustrated me was trying to do exact drawing in the program. The bezier curve was what i initially tried to use, however, it quickly became apparent that I would not be able to understand how to use it to recreate the face that I drew. The code became the result of me compromising on pretty much every aspect of my face I could see and then making very basic primitive shapes for all parts of my face.
Although I have prior knowledge in coding, I knew this was going to be very different from what I’m used to. I never had to code to create a drawing, so knowing that I might struggle, I made my sketch very simple.
I thought the most difficult part when coding would be doing my curly hair, but it was the eyebrow. I just used six different brown ellipses for the hair, and put my head in the front. But the eyebrow was hard because I didn’t know how to make the perfect arc I wanted. It took me many tries until I was able to place my eyebrows where I wanted them to be. But even so, my eyebrows are not perfectly symmetric to each other.
I wish I was capable of doing my individual hair strands, by using bezier. But overall, I am happy with how my self portrait came out.
Here’s the link to my sketch:
https://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/503835
The most challenging thing about this assignment was learning to think in terms of basic shapes. When I was planning the portrait, I had to think of the body in terms of its most basic components. I tried to focus on rectangles and ellipses, as those were the easiest to code. The head is almost all made of circles, with a few lines. I thought the clouds would be very difficult, but they actually didn’t take me very long. They were the last things I did, and so I’d gotten a hang of how to use the program. I made a series of small ellipses with no strokes and combined them into clouds. The actual hardest part of the project was figuring out the arc.
The one thing I couldn’t master was bangs. I have kind of weird, swoopy bangs, and I could not figure out how to code them. I tried using an arc, but I didn’t know how to rotate it. Nor did I know how to put a stroke only on one part of the arc.
Ultimately, I’m happy with how it turned out!
You can find it here: https://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/504627
This was very challenging to transition from drawing an image to making a model in processing. The most challenging portion is trying to make curve lines. The easiest way to do that seems to be, is using arc method which worked great for the mouth but not so much for the nose and ears. I wanted the nose and ears to rotate in specific ways but no matter what I do to the variables in arc they did not rotate the way I wanted them to. I was also surprised by how easy changing the colors as I thought it would be much more difficult but it was easy to get adjusted to it.
Link to processing site: openprocessing.org/sketch/504339
I previously worked with the processing program in my Data Structures class for the lab but it was nothing like the experience I had making the self-portrait. I used it in python and we didn’t really go into the code that made up the draw function. When working on the assignment I felt more under control and I was able to turn my code into art. Usually, when we think of code we envision work being done with engineering software such as blockchain or artificial intelligence. It was a good feeling to know that code can also be used as a form of art. I still need to work on getting my ideas out faster through the code but the assignment was quite fun. The colorway for myself portrait was inspired by hip-hop artist Tyler the Creator.
https://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/503878
While creating this self-portrait, I found it difficult to ballpark where the points would end up on the grid, but I began to get the hang of it as I continued drawing shapes. I’m not sure how you would tilt a shape (ex. to make arms or hair), but enjoyed experimenting with different transformations I could make to the shapes. I wanted to keep it feeling as organic as possible, which is why I avoided hard corners/shapes like polygons and straight lines. I struggled a lot figuring out how to use bezier curves. Unlike a circle where you can create it and then just move the center point to move the entire shape, when you move one coordinate on a bezier curve it changes the entire shape of the curve and the shape you had is distorted. It took me a second to figure out how to turn the arc upside down to create the body, but after refreshing myself on the unit circle it made more sense. I was pleasantly surprised to find that to create the irises of the eyes, I could copy the code from the eyes and just change them from ellipsi to circles. They ended up looking exactly how I hoped for them to. For some reason it isn’t allowing me to upload my sketch. The image upload keeps failing.
Link to sketch: https://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/503765
This was my first coding experience, so I tried not to make the self portrait too demanding in order to allow me to practice the basics without getting too stressed. Regardless, I still found the program to be extremely challenging at first, particularly when it came to solving creative problems like drawing hair and aligning shapes so the proportions come out accurately. Initially I had tried to draw the hair with arc functions but ultimately found it too difficult and decided to try straight line functions for now. Hoping to practice more and improve on using Processing, particularly studying functions and familiarising myself with the graphing system so that placing shapes becomes more intuitive.
Link to sketch: https://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/504052
The transition from a hand-drawn sketch to a Processing sketch was more difficult than what I imagined. Since Processing doesn’t provide coordinate grid on the sketch, it was hard to think in coordinates and approximate where a center of an arc has to be. Speaking of arc, it was near impossible for me to successfully create arcs. It took me almost 30 mins to figure out semi-ellipse arc for the mouth. I still cannot freely create arcs that I want. I also wanted to create new shapes, but for the shape function, Processing had trouble defining the variable s. As for rectangles and lines, they were easy to position once I escaped the blank canvas, and was able to position elements in relation to the others.
Its been over a year since I’ve had to use processing. I used it in my data structures lab to implement visual representations and methods of the data structures we discussed. it was very stressful since we were actually graded for it. But this time it was a little bit more relaxing, especially because this is not data structures. I was never a good sketcher, and I never will be. However, coding my face actually seemed a lot more natural to me since i just have to tell the computer what to draw. I don’t really have good grasp of what my face looks like. So I just used my bitmogji as reference. Perhaps, I will be able to add on to this sketch as the semester continues.
I thought drawing the portrait was hard until I had to recreate it in processing. Compared to drawing, coding the portrait was much harder. While working in processing, there was a lot of trial and error and studying the processing website to figure out how exactly to use the functions. The biggest challenge in changing mediums was the lack of control; in processing, it was difficult to gauge where you were since the program works on a grid system. Additionally, coding anything curved or odd shaped was extremely challenging. I found making the hair the hardest part because there are a lot of different curves and hair is typically not one shade, and I had to compromise and make it one rather than doing fifty different strands and shades. Coding in processing was much more time consuming and I felt as though I was making a lot of compromises because I could not replicate my drawing perfectly.
