The Lion's Rear

Now that I am Back on to the Plotter Train with vsketch , I am making some nice little Generative Art . This page will catalog my creative endeavors with the AxiDraw and related software packages. These look so much better in person, roam:You Should ask me to see them.

This page will be updated regularly with my work and has a feed to go with it if you're so inclined to see when I post new art on the page: https://thelionsrear.com/plotter-art.xml

with some perlin noise.

ongoing

The camera doesn't really do this one justice, it's so tactile, and the contrast is perhaps too high.

The Nissan 160J won the Kenya Safari Rally four times but here it is at home in Japan alongside its badge-siblings the Nissan Violet and the Datsun 510.

art of rally is just such a good game. I fire it up sometimes still just to scream through Sardinia or crash in to a tree in Finland. I have a whole gallery of my favorite photos from my first play-through, and have been going through it looking for things suitable to feed to DrawingBot .

This piece shows das whip, an artist's interpretation of an BMW M3 hurling itself in to the air over a crest. I really liked this shot, because you can see that the car at the last second was thrown in the direction it needed to be facing when it landed, so from straight behind you get a neat 3/4 profile of the car.

DrawingBot has a really nice edge-detection mode which I used to punch up the details on the car and the roadway. It's way better than Inkscape's Trace Bitmap functionality which always requires a fair bit of cleanup. That is layered with a line hatching that is random but biased toward the same angle so you get some nice hatching in the sky, though it's sort of lost on the tarmac.

I need to understand how to make the colors pop a bit more, still. Even with the source image's contrast pulled way up and certain elements enhanced in the roam:Gnu's Not Unix Image Manipulation Program , you can see that the thing that really stands out the most image is the sky, when the car itself is blue and red and white and pops a lot more in the original.

Come back to my AxiDraw and DrawingBot with this photo I took on the 2021 Metris Camper Trip a few hours before I almost got the van stuck in the Quilomene wilderness miles from cell service.

I'm a bit out of practice, my pens are a bit worn, but this stuff is still real fun. I need to go take more photos around Eugene and Oregon and the world, and put them to paper.

DrawingBot is fun! The premium version will do color-matching based on the image's colors so you can do some really fun semi-realistic works assuming you have enough colors to work with.

This is just another angle on tracery generating s-expressions to feed in to a clojurescript macro. generate cljs-bach code to procedurally generate synthesized audio ...

• https://github.com/adam-james-v/svg-clj

• https://github.com/rogerallen/tweegeemee

• https://github.com/stathissideris/dali

Once, Chao Chou asked a monk, “Have you been here before?” The monk responded, “Yes, I have.” Chao Chou said, “Have a cup of tea.” Later, Chao Chou asked another monk, “Have you been here before?” The monk replied, “No, I haven’t.” Chao Chou said, “Have a cup of tea.”

The head monk of the temple had been observing this, and said to Chao Chou, “Whenever Your Reverence asks a monk, ‘Have you been here before?’ whether they say ‘Yes’ or ‘No,’ you say, ‘Have a cup of tea.’ What’s the meaning of this?” Chao Chou answered, “Head monk! Have a cup of tea.”

A series of four prints done of the hanzi character for Tea . I will hang one of these in my tea room, and possibly gift the others to tea-loving friends. This was an experiment in making "brush stroke" patterns, and it's not quite the effect I would like but it is nice and simple and I really love some of the close in details of the final prints.

The green one was done with Pilot V5 pens, the others with Pilot G2 pens. I do really like both options, the "kinetic" nature of the G2 pens flowing less freely than the V5 pens gives the works all a very unique feeling, and some of the shading which happens as a result is a bit mesmerizing up close. I think it's really interesting that some of the prints failed to take ink in the same places, I'm not sure what to make of that (the fifth stroke in particular of the orange and dark-green ones)

The ensō is a form in Zen calligraphy meant to be performed in one uninhibited brush stroke as a representative form of pure, wise, creativity.

In this case, it was the first thing I got working in vsketch and it is not a single stroke, but 360 lines creating a flowing bezier cloth wrapping back on itself creating some really interesting moire and shading effects. The effect is from a distance indistinguishable but up close you can see how far from absolute enlightenment I still am.