Jungathon: April 2015

The latest little project is to write a bash script that will combine arbitrary images from my hard drive in random ways. Ultimately, I suppose, I'd like to create a ruleset that iterates over images until some predetermined conditions are satisfied, with the expectation that this would produce aesthetically interesting results. That's the long game.

In the meantime, I've completed a small proof-of-concept that basically generates something akin to double exposure photographs. I'll put some up over the next few days, but here are a couple of failed efforts I arrived at along the way. No transparency, obvs, but I still kind of like the results.

Zen Cricle 4

Zen Circle 3

Zen Circle 2

Zen Circle 1

I was kind of blown away by some zen circles I saw recently, and have been meaning to give it a go.

I actually didn't mean to scan them at 50ppi or whatever I have done, but that's what happened so I'm just going to roll with it and call it another kind of pixel art.

I have like 12 of these, so it might be a boring couple of weeks, post-wise.

Dwarf Fortress Numix

I missed a day yesterday, and I'm dredging up whatever I can to make sure I don't miss another today. Here's an svg I made to serve as a numix icon for dwarf fortress.

It's not properly finished or anything, but it looks the part in my cairo dock.

If you don't know what some of the words here mean you can google them, but I can almost guarantee you'll wish you'd spent those minutes differently,

[edit] It won't let me upload svgs! dang. here's a png that's similar.

If you want the svg to use in your numix icon set, let me know!

Bottle 2

Man, can't say I'm happy with this. Not fond of the whisky, not pleased with the execution.

You probably noticed that the neck is reminiscent of a veiny cock shaft.

Shame.

Bottle 1

"Concept" "Art"

The idea here is to sort of capture the atmosphere of those crappy old educational games you got at schoold when the BBC Micro was rolled out.

Oregon Trail and whatnot.

I've actaully detracted from this by casting it in a stylish monochrome and drawing an elegant retro font. But I dunno, does that help it key into the vibe of a cross-stitch you might have framed on the wall?

Anyway, it'll probably never go anywhere. If it did, it would be crude role-playing game to help children identify signs of dysfunction in their family dynamics. Possibly with a satirical fascist youth movement / nanny state indoctrination tone.

I'm going to be honest now, and admit that I ran out of my scheduled posts last Thursday.

I'm away on holiday and have raked through my image folder to build a new queue that can post automatically while I'm away.

Hey-ho. There's something to be said for working to a schedule, even self-imposed.

Like here, look, the colour I've dropped in has ended up being contstrained by the pixels in an interesting way. A little like those old colour blocks on ZXSpectrum games.

I guess stuff like that wouldn't occur to me if I wasn't desperately trying to reconcile myself to crap I've just cobbled together...

Sprites

Sprites are crazy hard to do well.

The positioning of individual pixels massively alter the overall composition and effect.

And then you have to do all sorts of weird things with colour and aliasing to approximate the design you're looking for.

More Hardware

I actually still think the pixel art approach could work for training technical staff (of around my age, anyway). It's got a consistent, attractive (to my eyes) aesthetic and is schematic and scaleable.

Graphic assets can be owned by the company and re-used to its heart's content.

You could even make little animated walkthoughs and stuff...

Hardware

This is a picture of a nano GSM base tranceiver station.

I did it at/for work with the vague notion that the technical manual I was writing could be "cool", "fun" and "stylish" if given a coherent visual look.

HA!

Grand Designs

squarepop wave

squarepop

squaredance

magic carpet

I've been looking for a mspaint clone to use at home on my linux laptop. Have tried many, and think I finally have a winner in Kolourpaint.

Seems like it has mspaint's functionality with some of the more annoying non-features corrected. Like, this thing scrolls the page when you go to expand outside the border. Good thinking, batman!

image mash 2

image mash