Old Ships

Since yesterday I am working on an idea, but I just can’t get it to run. It’s like I completely forgot everything and I don’t know what I am doing wrong. Even copying code that looks like it’s doing the same thing doesn’t help. I am so stuck so here are some ships from four years ago, I just modified them to run on the web.

Pacman and Ghost

The 5-year-old son of a friend requested that Pacman should really close his mouth.

So I searched for old Pacman games and looked closer than I had done before. My mistakes were clearly obvious. Plus – by playing a few rounds of the old game in a browser I realized that the ghosts are an important part of it. So I decided to add on to my previous code.

Here is the revised version.

What did I learn from this? Getting reference is as important in coding as it is in art.

Heading home

Flying home after the witches’ meeting is never in formation. Just like normal humans.

Join them here.

Today I don’t have that much time, so the trees will have to wait until another project. Now it’s time to prepare salad for the barbeque.

Witches on Friday 13th

Witches on Friday 13th always fly in formation.

See for yourself.

This morning I thought I know all to accomplish my idea easily today. Drawing the witches was easy. Finding out how to scale and translate correctly took more trial and error.

I had also planned trees or mountains for the witches to fly over. I thought if the trees move to the left the witches would look like flying to the right. Like you all know from film. No problem. Figuring out how to group the variables of the trees together to have different sizes of trees moving at once – too much for me today. I was discussing several solutions with my expert and to each one he said: “You can do this with an array.” And I was always like: “No array today, please.” I actually started reading, coding etc., but I can’t finish this in time to let the witches fly on Friday 13th. So they just fly really high tonight in front of a full moon.

Summer for the Ants

Did you know that ants have more hours per day in Summer than in Winter? When it gets warmer an ant is able to increase its speed so much (and keep it up) that it gets much more done. So it’s like they have more hours.
Imagine that for yourself. What would you use these hours for? Who would you hide your time secret from?

Today I was already experiencing the normal life of a programmer – everything takes more time and in the end you can’t get it finished on one day.

So instead of the project I had planned for today I modified a little fun project I did two days ago. I was relearning nested for-loops to get a grid of shapes. Actually like the very first code on this blog ( the colored rows of bats). But I wanted it to be moving and somehow interactive. Now you can change the speed and background color.

Move the mouse from left to right to make it Summer for the ants.


Paul Klee is looking

Sometimes all the new ideas are too complicated to achieve on one day. I need to learn more and figure out how to tackle my ideas best. So today I overworked a sketch I did four years ago. It was inspired by a Paul Klee painting.

The sketch is quite simply built with lines and shapes. Anyone can do this with figuring out the right coordinates. But I wanted to do something new every day, so I made Paul Klee looking around, following your mouse movements.

That needed so much math that I again asked for help to understand the atan2() function. Luckily my boyfriend also explained the bad habits of some people writing JavaScript that confused me as I tried to understand the code examples. I am constantly learning.

And you can give Paul Klee a look around now.

Discover Mondrian

You are in the museum. It’s night, dark. You only have your flash light. You were ordered to steal this famous painting by Mondrian. But – is it the right one?

Find out here.

My boyfriend helped me with the flash light functionality. He says asking for help is not cheating. I should take his word for this. But why are my ideas always so much more complicated than my abilities allow? I just thought it would be boring to just show you Mondrian’s painting…

I’M IN.

The reason why I started this coding challenge just now is that today started the Season of Habit in Get Messy .

I am now part of the Get Messy art journaling community for nearly exactly three years, since the 6th of September 2016. Since then I have filled many art journals about different topics, mostly working along the “seasons” of Get Messy: For two month all the artists in the community explore a specific topic. This can be by experimenting with tutorials from members or even by collaborating in each others journals.

I met so many fascinating people in this group and I definitely wouldn’t have made so much art (and mess) without them.

So today’s code art is a Thank You – an imitation of the season announcement that participating artists can post in their Instagram feed. I tried to copy it as good as I could. But especially the little yellow arrows in the upper left corner were a real challenge. It is so easy to just scratch them on paper with a pen- but don’t dare to program them! Half of them is coded using a for-loop, but I had to fake the first and last row of them by hand to achieve the asymmetrical look.

See for yourself.

Starting easy with pixel art

There are so many possibilities for beginner coding art. After painting small papers to prepare ideas for half a rainy Sunday I finally begann coding.
The exercises from the EdX.org course I just started were challenging. After completing half the task I switched to watching funny Youtube video.

But – that gave me the idea for Pacman! Mastering the arc-function was the most difficult part. Now I am glad I had this idea – funny, interactive and it relates to the beginning of computer art and games.

Just move your mouse over the window.

Open Pacman in a new window.