Tom Painter

Truchet animation test

tompainter — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:28:25 +0000

Been geeking away on more functions for Truchet.

now we have..
> much improved spray paint effect with better colour sampling from the image
> new ability for transparency and layering of effects
> pixelization effect
> stripes effect
> ability for the image to attempt to regenerate itself
> lots of animation controls

Truchet – Painterly effects

tompainter — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 17:42:42 +0000

Been adding more painterly effects to Truchet++

Pseudo spray paint texture (needs a little work)
Pseudo compression ( square, blocky effect)
Half-tone dots
gradients
Opacity controls

This starting to look closer to some of my traditional painting techniques. Im hoping to add more effects soon to make things look more organic.

Bristol & Paris

tompainter — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 11:24:44 +0000

A couple of weekends ago, we went to go check out Bristol as Ive never had a proper look around there.

Ive always been impressed by the creative output of the city, After all in recent times Bristol has brought us Banksy, Aardman and Will Barass amongst other things.

In the last 3-4 years Ive been finding some of my favourite musicians have been coming from Bristol. Joker, Gemmy and Ginz have been creating a new sound they they call ‘Purple’.
As Joker says: ‘Purple is a colour’ . Their truly unique sound is characterized by 8bit soundscapes and a melodic and mellow interpretation of Dubstep and Grime genres. Sonic the hedgehog’s soundtrack was obviously a massive influence on Joker’s synaesthetic melting pot of influences.

In these days of instant cultural Cross-pollination on the internet (yes I can see the irony here!), its great to see a city with such a unique and fiercely guarded identity.

The big surprise of the trip for me was the discovery of Paris’s new abstract murals scattered around the city on walls and various vehicles. I think fellow Bristolian Mr Jago, and also the stuff Futura2000 did for DJ krush’s Holonic album must have been an influence as all signs of any letter-forms have almost completely melted away in this new work. Great stuff.

Merry Christmas ++

tompainter — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 16:14:13 +0000

For this year’s Bigman Christmas card I decided to use our Truchet++ program (see earlier post). To get the effect I wanted, I added functions for how randomized or true to the original image the colours were, and a small chance of the grid size doubling.

I’ve been having tons of fun with this so keen to develop it further, next on the list is a whole heap of animation parameters for making ‘tangram-ized’ video.

Painting again

tompainter — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 09:51:27 +0000

Ive been experimenting for the last year or so with a mix of aerosol paint and paint pens on paper.
Its a new, raw, fast and dirty style for me, no doubt induced by hours of painstaking photo-realistic work in the day job!

hoping to get together enough to show in 2012.

Glitch art

tompainter — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 11:38:33 +0000

As a kid, when my ZX spectrum used to frustratingly crash mid game I used to find some consolation in the beautiful colourful images it would generate if you so much as looked at the joystick interface.

Ive been getting more and more obsessed with the use of digital artifacts as an artform in their own right

Wired Magazine have a good article on it.

Wikipedia have a few bits

Youtube has lots of cool stuff including the original data moshing trilogy

Heres an out-take from one of my 3D scenes.

Ive just ordered this cool looking book from Mark Batty publishers, cant wait to read it

RIP Airside

tompainter — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 12:23:59 +0000

Its a shame to see you go Airside, but nice that you are going out on a high

akaelph

tompainter — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 10:58:25 +0000

Elph, from Edinburgh writes a fantastic blog.

Great to see such passion and still innovating after many years in the game.

I heart datamoshing!

Truchet ++

tompainter — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 21:31:03 +0000

Ive been getting really inspired by procedural artwork for a while now, and I have been itching to have a try myself. After reading some great books like Form and Code & The Blind Watchmaker (see my earlier post) I decided to get stuck into some Processing. Processing was written by Ben Fry and Casey Reas at MIT with the goal of making code more accessable to artists.

As my company, (Bigman) uses tangrams extensively in its brand identity I thought it would be a fun first challenge to try and build a program that can generate patterns of tangram shapes automatically.
The solution seemed to be out of my reach until I managed to break down the problem into a few simple steps. The initial inspiration came from Sebastien Truchet

1. This is exactly like how Mr Truchet did it all those years ago. randomly oriently square tiles.

2. To break it up abit I added bigger ones every now and then

3. Things get a little more interesting when the small shapes are allowed to join into bigger shapes.

4. Adding a few more rules for how the small shapes can join together, and giving each a unique colour gives a nice broken pattern.

5. As this is coded rather than created by hand we can do cool things like huge canvas sizes.

6. By placing an image underneath our pattern and taking the colour from that pattern for each triangle, its possible to ‘filter’ an image into a tangram pattern similar to how a Photoshop filter might work

7. I have this working for animation sequences now, will be adding more features soon to make this into a fully fledged video effect.

Wakefield

tompainter — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 20:23:12 +0000

Ive been back in my hometown of Wakefield over the weekend, whilst I was there I visited the brand new Hepworth Wakefield.

Whilst Im not the hugest fan of Barbara Hepworth, the museum has a great collection, not only of Barbara’s work, but of her st. Ives and Wakefield contempories such as Henry Moore and my personal fav, Ben Nicholson (below). The building itself is in a striking location on the river Calder weir opposite chantry Bridge, there are plenty of great views of the city from inside and outside the building.

As if this wasnt enough for one weekend I also found that Jaume Plensa has a wicked show on up at the nearby Yorkshire sculpture park too, which is well worth a visit just for a walk and the cafe even if you dont like sculpture. I hear Dizzee Rascal is a big fan of the YSP!

It was fun to see wireframe heads in this context!