Category: Allgemein

Today I tried to realize my original idea for combining art journaling with creative coding. I dreamt about having lots of little functions, pictures and code snippets that I could simply paste together to some great code art – much like I do in my art journals with, paint, drawing, writing and collaging. But only better because moving and interactive.

So today I activated my long forgotten graphic tablet to paint some small pieces and to do some photo editing. Turns out that playing around with pictures and figuring out how to combine an alpha channel with a photo took me quite some time.

But now you can paint on my art journal page while it’s magically being written – here.

This snowman idea turned out quite differently than I had planned. I wanted to let it snow on him, when you shake the bubble. But I need to figure out how to tilt the bubble and how to confine the snowflakes inside the bubble.

Both is more than I can manage today.

But you can still shake him!

Yippie – I made the first little game since my “Castle – Feed the Bat” game. And this one even counts the lives of the mermaid and displays a “Game Over” screen.

It is not quite finished though. I would like to make it more difficult by adding more than one shark. And in the beginning I want a “Welcome” screen that explains what to do. And the ultimate goal is to get it to run on my mobile. Then I have more than one game to shove under peoples’ noses to explain what I do here.

Help the mermaid to avoid the shark here!

The easiest way to create a ghosty mermaid. Getting her to move in a more realistic way will take me another day.

But you can draw a trail with her on the background – a little bit.

Sometimes I get small stupid ideas and think it would be good to realize them (on paper, in code…). So while trying to learn about trigonometry and sine, cosine and arctangent I got this PI / Pie idea from listening to Dan Shiffman’s explanations.

By the time I had placed all the cherries a good confectioner would have baked the cake 🙂

Nothing moving this time.

I feel the need for vacation – so I coded some nice fish and edited out all the plastic from their ocean.

If I don’t code enough every day I start to lose my progress really fast. This one was supposed to be an easy one and even this was hard for my brain in some parts – after watching too much Youtube.

Need vacation too?

The inspiration for this sketch came from one of my childhood books – a young ghost is sent to a spooky castle with a very old ghost to learn how to be frightening. A part of being spooky involves a creaking door.

I wish I could achieve the look of a children book’s illustration with Processing, but that is a future plan.

Yesterday I designed the ghosts walking through the door with proper opening and closing times. Today I added the sound of the creaking door.

Turn the sound on for this!

This sketch is a tribute to the cutest bear (still) living on earth – the Red Panda. It is a vegetarian tree-climbing bear loosely related to the Big / White Panda. It’s habitat is endangered by deforestation.

Feed it some of it’s favorite food – bamboo.

Okay, it took me two days to figure that out – again. My ideas are too complicated, but I don’t want to give up on them. I just thought I could add a text box for the user to enter a self-written text – quick and easy. Should be done in a few hours max. *piff*

Once I had understood how it all worked together and had all the small mistakes eliminated, adding the different colors and fonts was quick and easy. Just testing if German “Umlaute” (ä, ö, ü) would work and here we go.

Try it out.

For quite some time I wanted to create art journal pages in Processing. But an essential part of these pages is – the journaling. That meant faking handwritten text and even better – faking writing the text.

This sketch is an attempt to do so. It took quite a while to get the spacing of the text aligned with the writing pencil. But that was quick in comparison to debugging my code. I wanted to publish this 26 hours earlier! Today I was so frustrated searching for the mistakes and correcting them. My expert tried to comfort me (“There are days like this!”) and he saw immediately what had to be done.

Here it is.