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.

The Various Misadventures of the Wolfe Girls

This is a short (semi fictional) comic about my sister, Erin. These are still the raw inks, I need to clean them up a bit and color away, but I'm quite happy with it. Click on (read more) and then the first image for best viewing

Revised Skoll Storyboard

My Skoll storyboard got through to the next round of voting to be made into an actual animation. Here are the revised storyboards that flesh out the story a bit. Caroline Record was partnered with me to help, and the first few new slides are hers :)

You can view the original storyboard way back here :)

Copy of Skoll on Prezi

A Birthday Card for Kiera

Reaction Diffusion Textile Printing

If you haven't already, check out this post where I talk about how I created the pattern that I'm printing here first.

So I made the decision to try to print the fabric here on campus rather than shipping the file off to Spoonflower or one of the other companies that will do this work for you. This was partly for budgetary reasons, but also because I wanted to be involved in every step of the process, and this is a big part of it.

Unfortunately our print lab was out of nice rolls of HP print fabric, so I ended up ironing on some fusible to the back of some basic cotton I had and running it through the printer. First up some test swatches.

Since this fabric was just cheap stuff from Joannes and not treated with anything to make it better suited to absorbing the ink, the colors didn't come out quite as I intended. So I tried two versions, one normal and one with the red keyed out (since the printer handled black and blue much better)

Ultimately, I was very attached to the red design and just keyed up the contrast on photoshop ( I also can layer the same red sheer I used in the final gown of my collection to intensify the color during garment construction).

And after a stressful hour and a half of wrangling with the printer, what I ended up with was a beautiful yard and a half of custom reaction diffusion fabric! I can't wait to turn this into a finished piece, even though I ended up eating a lot of my fabric doing test swatches, so I don't have quite enough to make a complete dress, a bodice will most likely suffice.

I also ended up using the black and white version to line the white dress in my collection, a detail you can't see from the runway photos :)

Reaction Diffusion Textiles and Pattern Making

Okay this this particular look from the collection, modeled by the super badass Madison, I dropped the ball on just a bit.

As lovely and clean as it looks in the white, I really wanted to use it as a base for my reaction diffusion algorithm, with the end result looking more like this. (Though I do love the clean well tailored lines)

To that end, I've been working on remaking it using a little more digital prowess, including the textile printing that was slightly out of my budget for the original.This was actually the first dress I designed for the collection, thus there were many many tortured muslin iterations as I learned how to make a well fitting garment.

After finally getting one that fit nicely to my dress form, I tore it apart and scanned it in. Madison's version was actually heavily tailored from this pattern (since we only were able to fit our models after winter break), and her hips and arms are much more slender than my own or the dress form's.

 From here, I was a quick live trace away from a nice clean vector image of my pattern to scale, which I then threw into a slightly tailored reaction diffusion application in Cinder. For those of you who have never encountered reaction diffusion, it looks something like this.

It essentially is two equations that can be used to simulate a chemical reaction that is used in nature to generate an infinite number of animal patterns/prints. This is old code from earlier my knit reaction diffusion work. Toxiclibs does an amazing job of summarizing the more technical aspects of the simulation if you are interested.

I was particularly interested in incorporating this simulation/generative art into my fashion design work since I think it draws a very elegant parallel to the furs/skins more often used in high fashion and on the run way. This application allows you to grow your own personally customized "skin" directly onto the pattern pieces for an organic and personalized feel that you don't need to carefully skin hundreds of tropical fish for.

Here's the final pattern, with each pattern piece thrown into the application and its texture grown onto it.

Check out This Post where I talk about the printing process