Generative Trees

A Confession full of Sorrow and only slightly tinged with Regret.

I have a confession to make. I did none of the below things during my break. Instead I did the following...

Current Musings | Bucket List for break

( 1 )  Knit/Felt myself a fox mask/hat inspired by these adorable creations by Everlasting Sprout. Ahaha I'll probably leave eye holes in mine though.

( 2 ) Reverse engineer how these mindblowingly fragile + beautiful creations of Frances Geesin were created and try something of a similar vein myself. From what I can gather, they seem like they are electroplated polypropylene fibres that she completely covered a mold with, and either let dissolve into the electroplating bath or carefully sculpted to begin with. My head is spinning with the possibilities.

(3) 3D print/electroplate some chain mail. Now that I've discovered electroplating (oh ho how I'm a sucker for SCIENCE) I can think of all sorts of interesting applications for it. I've always wanted to try 3D printing chain mail (the fact that you can print the links already intersecting is pretty damn cool) but its hard to actually use it afterwards since 3D printed objects still read painfully plastic. However, if you can electroplate your finished product, you'll have a lightweight, flexible, beautiful chain mail.

 (4) Build myself one of these beautifully designed electric spinning wheels by Glacial Wanderer over at Dreaming Robots. This really is an amazing project. Mr. Wanderer designed the thing himself based off of more traditional spinning wheel setups and then released the dFab files and careful instructions on how to recreate the electronics involved over on his site. So the entire thing is completely open source and aimed at knitters/fiber nerds ( like myself ) who usually are completely overcharged for such things due to it being such a niche market.

(images via here, here and here)

(5) Learn how to spin on said spinning machine. There's something about the texture, color, and the really calm and simple process of suggesting order on some completely wild and unruly thing that really hooks me. Knitting is a little bit like doing crack, except it calms you down and you usually end up with something cozy afterwards rather than the shattered remnants of your former life. 

(oh PS, that first image is from the Etsy site of this really wonderful girl who makes completely covetable hand dyed roving. So you know, if any of my family (aka all of the readers of this blog) is wants to champion this noble cause ( huh huh? ), any one of her braids would cause me to promptly expire from happiness)

Magnetic Mesh | A Processing Sketch

This is an evolution of a quick processing sketch I did for Golan's class based on a magnetic physics system. I was incredibly disappointed since I built it from scratch without using any physics libraries, but then it just looked like any other pseudo generic flocking blaaaah. So I decided to turn it into an app to generate interesting background patterns for me to use in my illustrations. You can read me talk more about it on the iacd blog.

This video also illustrations the awesome iterative work process you can have in processing, just building off sketches quite painlessly. It doesn't really pay off to work this way in other coding frameworks like Cinder or OF since it takes so long to test and compile, and it really makes more sense to sit down and figure out what you want and then carefully plan and code. Processing kind of lets you just go with whatever whims you have and test them in these quick and lightweight sketches, I love it.

When I have time, I'll paint large watercolor pattern swatches and use them to texture the meshes similar to this sketch below.