Three ways to do something

I am very excited to start learning Open Frameworks!

I like the idea of using drawings and images as a form of input. I decided to play around with using another photo to color a line drawing.

Once I had it working, I showed it to Zach and he offered two others ways I could do it. My original approach was quite brute force. I used the lightness/darkness of a pixel on the line drawing to decide if I should make a 1 pixel by 1 pixel rectangle grey if the original was near-white or colored if the original was near-black (part of a line). If colored, I would then get the color to use from a pixel on another photograph. The second approach was to create a new image instead of creating hundreds or thousands of rectangles, one for each pixel. The last approach was even more fun: to use shaders to define the final image.

I really liked this way of learning. It was good to attempt a brute force approach, followed up by actually coding up 2 different alternatives. It creates more depth in terms of understanding the space of possibilities.

As a method, I liked that the background color photo gives an interesting pallete. Beyond that, it was fun to play with juxtaposing meaning, possibly in a subtle way. This comes through more in drawings that are more dense, like the last one below.

Lots of fun to play with!

Original bird line drawing from Tamar Levi drawing

Original New York skyline line drawing from Rod Pepper drawing

The original color photos are my own.

Written on October 30, 2014