screenprinting project

Really bad at updating this dang thing! Argh! Well, let's make up for lost time.  Here's the run down of the last couple weeks (minus thanksgiving week).  It turns out I'm much worse at screenprinting after having not done it for so long, took me until literally the last two layers to get back in the flow of it.  And tragedy struck on the last layer (which sort of influenced my decision to make it the last layer).  A hole! In my lovely screen :(.  Here are some photos:

So sad.  I also did not get as many layers as I was hoping for due to time constraints and it taking much longer than anticipated.

As for the splattering, I rolled a dice for the quadrant and the number for the first few layers, then started splattering, then started masking and splattering, and then more masking and splattering and then finally masking, painting, and splattering for a few layers (the last two to be specific).  If I were to continue, I would continue the masking, painting, and splattering until there were very few places not covered by the screenfiller.

final, update

This is an update on the final, not the final update :P.  I've done a proof of concept run.  Man, has it been a looooong time since I've done this.  I'm out of practice.  Also, it came out looking like some terrible pink camo.  BUT, that's mostly the color choice.  And the fact that I only have three colors.  There's not too much contrast going on here.  I might change this up a little and do something a little different.  I have two screens, so maybe I'll try these simultaneously.  I'm considering doing the initial dots as random splatters, but after that, just enlarging them ever so slightly each layer.  Anyway, here's a pic of my proofs of concept.  In all their teen girl redneck glory.

final project brainstorming

Little behind on this blog, but here i'll braindump my ideas for the final project.  Don't have many yet, but I'm hoping one of these will work:

1. Reverse Jackson Pollock fractal exploration screenprint.  This one is very non-technical.  Basically, I will do a sort of opposite jackson pollock.  I will take a screen, and each layer I will paint splatter some screenfiller onto it, then print a layer, and continue for 30 or so layers.  This should create a jackson pollock-like print, but it should look different as the drops will be subtractive, not additive.  It's also an exploration of his process taken to a different medium.  I'm not sure if this idea is appropriate as it's very non-technical.

2. My second idea is a continuation of the strange attractors, but adding a fourth dimension and creating an animation of them over time.  I would have the different start values fluctuate or maybe the input a, b, c values fluctuate.  I would have to experiment with that.  The downside to this project is that I'm not sure if it's an appropriate scope for a final project.  I'm afraid it might not be grand enough.

3. My third idea is to do screenprinting (I really like screenprinting and have been looking for an excuse to do it again... it's been a few years and that makes me sad).  This time, though, I would do cellular automata, a 2D representation of a 1D cellular automaton.  Sort of similar to amber's bead canvas.  Only I would change each layer slightly.  So the seed on the first layer would be 1000101, and the seed on the second layer would be 1100101, and so on and so forth.  The difficulty with this is that I would have to completely clean the screen between each layer which takes significantly more time than just cleaning it of ink.  Due to time constraints I would have to create much fewer layers.  Registering the layers would be more difficult, too, probably impossible to get very precise registration (registration is the act of lining up the layers so that they don't show beneath, when something is mis-registered you see a ghosting of a particular color, noticeable sometimes in magazines or newspapers if the printing got off).

strange attractors

Okay, so I waited a little too much until the last minute to print these off, BUT here are some of the images i got.

Both of these are the lorenz attractor.  The rossler i was working on was too dense for the computer... so it kinda would freeze it.

strange attractors

gah! i'm terrible at this whole blog thing, always have been.  Anyway, to try to make up for some lost time, here is where i'm at.

I've got the Rossler and Lorenz attractor creating themselves and rendering themselves gorgeously.

Here are some pics:

That is the lorenz attractor

This is the Rossler attractor.

I don't know about the positioning/coloration/glow on the rossler attractor.  I like the Lorenz a lot, I think I'm going to print that one for sure.  Tomorrow I'm going to print as many as they'll let me and then frame them (if they have frames) and hang them in the hallway.  To truly simulate the gallery experience :P.

chaotic systems brainstorming

I'm not sure what I want to do for the chaotic systems.  I do know that I want it to involve strange attractors, but I'm not sure how to make those art...  Let's look at some pretty pictures.

Helios by Nathan Selikoff

Update:

I've decided to just make beautiful strange attractors.  I'll probably make a series of each attractor and render them out in maya.  Here is a wip of the Lorenz attractor:

I still need to get the circles oriented to the curve and I'm not sure the effect I'll go for.  I might change my mind and make them spheres and render them as star like objects or something.  I'm not sure at this point.  I might also select all the curves and loft them together and put some crazy texture on them.  I will have to play with it.

genetic l-systems

meant to update the blog sooner.  Life got a bit in the way with this project, but I will put some screenshots and my thoughts on it after class.  I have a rogue seg fault, too, that I'm not sure how to track down.  I know where it is and what's causing it, but I don't know what is causing the cause of the seg fault if that makes sense.  Oh, nevermind, fixed the seg fault.  I was just doing something stupid in my code... the usual cause of seg faults :P.

Here are some screenshot

As you can see, I did not get the glowing effect to work.  I might still work on this because I feel like that would be a cool effect to have in my skills.