The circle is a spiral

I write about generative art, coding, creativity, and other interconnected topics. You can expect a journal every Friday sharing what I’ve been working on, some things I’ve found interesting, and links to my longer articles. Thanks for joining me here. 💖

Hans Ulrich Obrist of the Serpentine Gallery often publishes notes and doodles by various artists on his Instagram. I saw this one from Korakrit Arunanondchai years ago and it’s stuck with me.

This came to mind again this week as I worked on these handwriting spirals. I often feel like I’m going in circles (in all sorts of contexts), so I find it comforting to think that if I could zoom out, I’d see that there’s not just a repetition but a progression .

I’ve had a little more time for art this week, and it’s been pretty productive. I had a mechanical issue with my plotter that interrupted some explorations, but I hope to have time to resolve it soon with the helpful folks at Evil Mad Scientist.

Drawing spirals

I really started creating handwriting spirals and the obvious next step was to turn them into SVGs and trace them.

I like the back and forth between how much effort it took to set up the handwriting and sentence generation code, how “fast” it was to generate each of those pieces, and how much work it would take to write by hand. .

I also played with settings, like making the text larger as the spiral grows. I kind of want to dive right into the middle of it all.

It was when I was preparing a piece like this that my plotter started to get angry. Everything was more or less fine on the first pass, but something mechanical failed two-thirds of the way through the second pass (with a gold pen) and everything went out of alignment.

Since then, this type of misalignment has occurred frequently. I’ve been in contact with Evil Mad Scientist (the creators of the Axidraw) and they’ve been very helpful, so hopefully I’ll get this sorted soon!

I can’t wait to get back to it, especially since I love the effect of gold ink on black. It’s barely noticeable when looking at it from the front.

But it looks like this when tilted towards the light.

DREAMER.

Integrate handwriting into diagrams

Progress has been made integrating my handwriting code into my diagrams. I’ve shared a few examples of this before, where I was testing to see what it looks like – but then I was manually positioning all the labels etc. I have now configured collision detection for words.

The longest notes are currently all placed in one place, then any other elements that collide with them are removed. I’m going to create a system for finding large empty areas on the page which can then be filled with these notes as well as other content like tables, lists, scribbles, etc.

I also need to tighten up the style because now that I’m fully relying on the handwritten style, I need it to look like there are only 1-3 specific pens/pencils used for each diagram , rather than many varied traits. weight, etc.

Plus about 50 million other things.

Here’s a debug view, for fun! Each green/red circle is a collision point – reds indicate that a collision has occurred and an item has been deleted.

There you go, thanks again for joining me here!

I’ll leave you with this cool plant and I’ll see you here next week.

-Amy ⭐