LEARNING JOURNAL

Creative COding 02

Heading into this project it had been a wee while since I had used processing, Colab 01 to be exact and I was excited to learn some new skills within the program. Week one: working with images was certainly a change from what we worked on in Colab 01 and at first, I struggled to think of creative applications for images because I found it so starkly different from how I have worked with processing previously. Instead of just working with preloaded images I decided I wanted use my webcam as my image input.

However, nothing was really working until I started to work with the OpenCV library. This allowed me to manipulate the camera input, and by combining this with new skills like rotation I managed to produce some unique sketches.

I started by just grabbing the faces from camera input and using rotation to spin them, this was mainly just me working out how to work with OpenCV and the camera input, nothing aesthetic came from this…

This turned into the “fibinachme” sketch that looked like this…

Other sketches that were used to build the above output produced the following…

I also worked to glitch the image of the webcam with blendmode that produced outputs such as this… I loved the look of this however it was very “Strobey”

from here I wanted to use video or image input instead of the webacam. I used a clip from Prime ministers questions and to make an obvious statement that they are all clowns…

After working with OpenCv I wanted to move on to working purely with images but in a more practical way. It became less about making an artistic output but more a practice in trying to really get to grips with and understand images. So I began starting to try make a jigsaw game. This would require splitting an image into a grid then randomising they’re position on the grid and them having the ability to drag them back into position. Unfortunately I never managed to complete all these steps as I ran out of time….

I got very sidetracked by this jigsaw sketch and definitely didn’t manage my time properly. However it was a fun challenge to take on and I will definitely come back to it at some point to try finish it.

During the project I also worked with trigonometry which I enjoyed even if it did bring Higher maths flashbacks…

These simple sketches all demonstrated different ways of using SIN & COS to create waves and circles. Some even included noise to create random movement.

Expanding on that last image above created output such as:

Wrapping up

I really enjoyed this project, especially compared to creative coding 01 as we really took processing as a tool much further. Working with much more complex concepts as a pose to the primitive shapes etc really expanded the creative horizons and gave me a lot of inspiration for how to use it in the future. However this also came with its difficulties as there was almost too many possibilities I didn’t know where to start, but once i got into a sketch I really enjoyed how many different processing tools I now had at my disposal.