From the book I learned that the actual animal used for the model lived a sickly caged circus-type existence in New York City. Not exactly the symbol of adventure and wide-open prairies it evoked for me as a kid, but a perfect metaphor for the relationship bison had with North American settlers.

These are the output from a little Flash experiment.

I’ve got some other projects in a similar vein that I will be trying out. They will all have a nature/animal theme, and they will be built with hand drawn elements positioned by code.

The twigs are all positioned and sized w/ code. The eggs shape was made by hand, but positioned w/ code. In the future I plan to further randomize the shape, color and characteristic of each twig.

Behold, my very first generative comp. The image of a neon hot pink, scribbled, slightly-rotated square popped into my head one day. Maybe I’ve been listening to too much Justice. Made w/ Actionscript 3 and the Bezier curve fitting function built into Tweener.

Fit my curve!

In the same masochistic way I let a ping-pong sorting algorithim rule my life, I’ve been obsessing on how to draw elegant fluid curves in AS3 via Flash’s drawing API. This mostly started from being inspired by Erik Natzke’s work.

I started with the Flash drawing APIs generic “CurveTo” method, but it left “kink”s in the curves that passed through more than 2 points. Then I played with AS3’s built-in “BezierSegment” in the fl.motion package which produces a cubic bezier, which are similar to the curves in Illustrator.

I scoured the interwebs for the best curve fitting functions. Dug through old presentations of Rober Penner, The Father of Curves in Flash. Most of the math is way over my head but I did come across a few interesting ones:

• http://mike.teczno.com/notes/splines.html (AS2);
• http://www.paultondeur.com/2008/03/09/drawing-a-cubic-bezier-curve-using-actionscript-3/
• http://erikloyer.com/index.php/blog/cardinal_splines_in_actionscript/

These helped me better understand the differnt kinds of curves but ultimately what I wanted was a nice bezier curve fitting function. I wanted to say, “Here are 20 points, class. Now plot me a beautiful bezier curve based on them!”… And it was right under my nose the whole time. Tweener, which I use every day, has a built in Bezier curve fitting function that I somehow overlooked. Yowza!

In typical jacobmake fashion, I’ve spent an exuberent amount of time researching process without a pixel to show for it. Hopefully, I be able to present some rough generative sketches soon now that I’ve licked this curve addiction.

I think the owl is my favorite.

Then I had a eureka moment.

“I’ll use the bitmapData class, blur me some bitmap data. Then I could loop through and select pixel groups by value and trace out the groups!”

Then I had another eureka moment. (Two in one day, it was amazing.)

“Someone already did this, it’s called Live Trace and it lives in Adobe Illustrator.”

So here is what I did. I took this image. Then I killed the saturation, blurred it out and tweaked the contrast to get this;

Then I ran it through Live Trace with a grayscale setting and colors set to about 25. And it came out looking a lot like a topo map.

I think I could still do something siimilar in AS with the Bitmap data class, and maybe I will just to prove it to myself I can.

These sketches along with this Etsy artist, has given me some inspiration to tackle some acrylic paintings on wood panels. So… stay tuned for that.

Just a little while ago I made some comments about Chuck Close’s process. Since then I’ve revisited Joshua Davis’s site and downloaded his presentation from 07. For those that don’t know Joshua Davis, he is an artist that takes design elements and uses random math in Flash to position things, generating a thousand new compositions w/ each click of a button.

It was pretty ironic to see that Joshua pokes a fun at Chuck’s “process”. Davis uses Close’s work as a backdrop to some of his code samples. Davis finds kind of an interesting relationship between Close’s process and the his own process which includes a computer “processor”, that takes care of all the grunt work.

More than once I’ve vowed to return to analog means, but eventually I’d like jacobmake to develop a niche. The thing I’m most interested is generative art. Random math, shape and color appeal to me, especially the way Joshua Davis lays it out. In that 2007 presentation (which is basically just the slideshow from his actual presentation) he draws a line between himself and more “pure” programmatic generative artists like Casey Raes and the Processing gang.

I like the automation of Joshua Davis’s, but i’m missing the hands-on human element. Maybe i could find a mix, re-drawing computer generated art? Putting it through a human process? It would be a much slower version of how a computer can draw something, it would retain the human imperfections that live in Close’s work. Sounds like a pretty crack-head process I know.

I grew up in a small town. And in that small town my Grandpa owned some land on a creek. I spent many hours in the creek as a boy. Because of this I feel a special bond to most creek critters.

This concept would be a series of ink & watercolor pieces highlighting some of my favorite creek critters (some are not so much IN the creek but from around the wilderness of rural Missouri);

• Box turtle
• Crawdad
• Minnows
• Tadpole / Bullfrog
• Spiders
• Snapping Turtle
• Catfish, baby catfish
• Sunfish
• Rabbit
• Deer

Stylistically, I’m still not sure how I’d tackle this one, but ink & watercolor seems a good start. I recently put together some pieces similar in process in the preparation of my unborn daughter’s room.

Does this sound like a good project?