Antar-Plot
Hairy Beans
Some initial doodles and process by hand
This week was all about learning about bezier curves, creating classes properly in Processing, understanding push/pop matrices, and how on earth do you make hairy beans drawn by a plotter look like they were drawn by hand. While needed a fairly heavy amount of help, I’m very pleased with the outcome of these beans. The greatest challenge was by far trying to achieve an organic, bean shape. A realization I had was how the easiest thing for a human to make, was the hardest for the computer, as well as vice versa. It’s very hard for a human to freehand a perfect circle, but takes no time at all to make a asymmetric
blob with random short lines in all directions. However, in code it takes one line to draw a perfect circle, and it takes much more math and logic to create the organic blobs and the appropriate amount of hairs.
The biggest goal for this week was to create a generative art piece that would be nearly impossible to determine that a machine had drawn. Throughout this semester I want to make my digital art feel as close to my personal illustration style. These hairy beans were a great step in that direction. The organic blobs and small hairs came out just how I wanted them to and I’m quite pleased with the final plot. Using the acrylic paint markers on the translucent vellum paper gave a great dimension to the piece. I also enjoyed playing with line weight, colour, and materials, and how these could really transform the plotted piece from the generated pdf.
PDF of what the plotter traces
Placing the vellum on top of different surfaces
Plotting in the process