Hannah Sherwood
Hanna Liebl
John Yeoman

"Timothy Leary's Dream, or Lucy in the Sky With DrScheme
or, One Fish, Two Fish
Red Fish, Neon Avocado Fish"

Design Statement

Our intent with this project was to create a series of interesting images.  In approaching the project, we decided to focus on three different techniques for creating images, resulting in three distinct "sets" of images.  The first set consists of concentric ellipses, occurring in different parts of the image at different points in the iteration.  Striving for symmetry, we drew groups of ellipses first at the four corners, then in the center, repeating this with ellipses half the size of the originals.  The overall effect of these first images is Seussian, playing around with bright, crazy colors and simple, repetitive shapes.  The colors were roughly organized in a complementary manner, with blue next to orange and neon green next to hot pink.

The next set in our series is made of circles rotated around a path like a Spirograph.  We used the same repeating sequence of colors as in the first set, but we changed the brush twice.  The two Spirograph shapes drawn first were created using a fuzzy brush, making the shapes look blurry and out of focus.  The last two Spirograph shapes were drawn using a square brush, making the shapes appear sharper.  The contrast between the two brushes and the position of the Spirograph shapes on the canvas heightens the depth in the image.

The final set of images departs from the previous theme of circles.  Using the same color scheme, we drew rows of rectangles across the image, alternating each colored row with a transparent row so that the designs of the previous images show through.  This creates an interesting contrast between the straight lines of the rectangles and the curves of the circles.

Overall, we chose to explore how a repetitive, rather psychedelic color palette could be emphasized to greatest effect using layered shapes and different brushes. 

Technique Statement

For the first series of images, the concentric circles, we used recursion and a kernel statement to draw a series of circles using the built in GIMP drawing tools.  Each circle started at a location specified by the n value, which corresponded to a certain percentage of the width or height of the image so that the picture could be replicated on an image of any size.  We cycled through a list of colors using list-ref to repeat the same pattern of ten colors.

For the second set, we used numeric recursion to create Spirograph-like images.  We modified the draw-stamp! procedure to draw a circle, rather than the original line, rolled around a specified radius.  Each of the four spirographs is drawn using slightly modified code, so that each spirograph is a distinct shape.  Also, we make use of two different brushes in order to create a sense of contrast.  Lastly, we referenced the sequence of colors from the same list as the first set of images.

For the final set of images, we used region.compute-pixels! to draw rows of colored rectangles on top of the existing image.  We used modulo and quotient to get the color pattern to repeat over the width of the image.

Our three favorite images were created with n= 148, 370 and 920.  To save the last image, we took a screenshot of the image immediately after it was finished drawing, because region.compute-pixels! has been acting funny and overwriting parts of the image that it shouldn't.