MY FABRIC IS BEING PRINTED RIGHT NOW

Twenty-two yards of fabric and a roll of wallpaper are being printed for me today! I will receive it by next Wednesday (the 16th).

March 3, 2014

I have changed the direction of my project a little bit. I am not completely abandoning the 3D concept - it will be worked into the collection - but I am giving it a rest for a few days.

I have decided that I would like to make a series of fabric designs that center around mathematics and programming, specifically focusing on the ways recursion and other math/programming concepts can become beautiful. I am creating most of the designs in Processing, an IDE designed for visual artists that runs on the Java Virtual Machine.

The Cantor set is a good place to start with recursion. I wrote a program in Processing that produced the following visualization of the Cantor set:

I then took this image into Adobe Illustrator and applied a texture to it (done in Corel Painter). Here is the result:

I think this makes a great border design. It also works fairly well as a full, two-directional print:

I am currently working on a program that will draw the Koch snowflake. Here's what that looks like:

source here

I am working on this program and hope to have it working soon. It is significantly more complex than the Cantor set. I am on the case! In the meantime, I am laying out designs using a generation 1 curve, which looks like the Star of David:

Of course, I could use an existing image of the Koch snowflake to create the designs and call it a day, but I feel it's important to the concept of the project that I create the forms myself and that I understand the math and programming concepts behind them.

Getting the Koch program to work will be an important step towards creating more complex recursive functions, including Mandelbrot and Julia fractals. I am excited!

February 24, 2014

I think I've found a good way to mix anaglyphs with painted/sketched elements: letting the anaglyphs come to the foreground, as they should, and putting the painted elements in the background. This is so far working out better than having the 2D/3D elements compete for attention in the same plane. Here's an example:

The roses and lemons are anaglyphs (best viewed with red-cyan 3D glasses). I need to work on the painted textures; there is a problem with the way the dark gray repeats, and I would like to add more conspicuous texture to both of them. The key roadblock I'm hitting here is that I really need to wish I could have the superior texture you get with Corel Painter and the ease of creating repeats in Adobe Photoshop in the same program. Gotta keep trying, I guess!

I learned last week that including strong reds in my patterns, like the red roses, creates a strange effect with 3D glasses on. I wanted to try to exploit this a little, to make it a fun eye trick instead of an accident that ruins the effect. Here are two variations:

(The repeat problem with the dark gray texture is more obvious in these images...)

If you have 3D glasses, put them on and look at the images above. See what I mean about the eye trick? The effect happens because your left eye sees the crosses as white, and simultaneously your right eye sees the crosses as black. You can get a similar effect with pops of cyan, but I found that red is much more obvious.

I'm ordering fabric swatches this week!! I'm so excited to see these designs in print! They will go to the printer as soon as I've fixed the repeats, and they should arrive within a week. I'll also be printing a few test swatches using anaglyphs of varying sizes and some straight red and cyan, to check their interactions with each other and with other colors, and to make sure the texture of the fabric I choose doesn't throw anything off.

I'm also going to be taking new stereo pair images this week - it's time to wrap things up with the roses. I am in negotiations to borrow antique teacups, teapots, and silverware from a local flea market so I can photograph them - hopefully that will work out! I would appreciate any help I can get finding items like these that I can photograph this week. I promise to be careful with them and return them promptly! If you or anyone you know has some props for me, please send me an email. :)

February 17, 2014

I have made several changes to my technique for creating anaglyphs. Here's a before and after (not the same flower, obviously):

The anaglyph on the right has better coloration and a more realistic 3D effect. The changes mostly have to do with Photoshop technique: changing around my filter usage made a lot of difference with color fidelity, and cleaning up the red and cyan that spills over at the edges gets rid of the weird "ghosting" effect that happens on the right side of the left rose. (I thought for some reason that cleaning up the edges would break the 3D effect...? I was wrong.)

Another thing that made a huge difference is using true stereo pairs. The anaglyph on the left was made using a faked stereo pair (the same image, but one shifted over slightly). The anaglyph on the right uses a true stereo pair, meaning that I took two pictures of this rose from slightly different angles (one photo with my left eye at the viewfinder, one with my right eye at the viewfinder). It only took a little bit of extra time to create true stereo pairs, and the payoff is so great that I plan to use this technique for every other anaglyph I do. 

One problem I have run into is the difficulty of creating an anaglyph with altered photos. I have been applying a series of Photoshop filters to my images to get a paintlike effect, because I have found it usually looks a little nicer than putting straight photographs into my designs. I've found several combinations of filters that look great. The only problem is that most filters flatten the images to the point that 3D effects aren't really possible anymore. See below:

Method A is the same rose I showed you in the beginning - just the photographs, no filters. Methods B and C show what happens when I try to apply filters in two different ways. They're all technically anaglyphs, but only Method A has a good 3D effect.

This means that I will have to find ways to gracefully work photographic elements (anaglyphs) in with more painterly elements and vector elements. I'm having a little trouble doing that in this context so far, but I think it will come to me as I continue to work on it.

See? It's okay, but not as smoothly integrated as it could be. Thoughts?

Update: I just noticed that the red/pink roses are very visually jarring with 3D glasses on. I guess I need to stay away from color extremes, even with elements not directly related to the anaglyphs!