Regruntled.com

My process, such as it is:

• I have an idea, like the Voronoi sudoku, so
• I write some code,
• Which generates some images,
• Which gives me ideas for changing the code.

Lather, rinse, repeat.  The process seems to work best when it’s slightly out of control.  How is it out of control?

• When I’m working on the code, I can’t visualize what the image will look like.
• I usually introduce some sort of randomness, which means I really can’t know what will happen.
• I make mistakes.

The result is that I surprise myself, I end up with something that’s not exactly what I expected.  This seems to be a nerdly recapitulation of something from Ehrenzweig’s The Hidden Order of Art:

The medium should be resistant enough to prevent over-planning.

Bill Turnbull of Jakarta has an automated solitaire program that he uses to test different strategies.  As a computer nerd, I can appreciate what he is doing.  And yet, after setting up his program and watching it grind through game after game, I am struck by the hilarity of the whole idea of automating solitaire.

Bill’s program shares a web site with artist Rozi Turnbull, presumably Bill’s wife.  She describes herself:

I am the middle child of a musical and artistic family from Dorking in Surrey, England.

So.  Solitaire, programming, art, and Dorking are all connected.  The Googleverse is abundant.

Lately I’ve been playing with Paint.Net, yet another paint program.  This one is free, but not open-source.  It allows people to write plug-ins in C#, my favorite language for image manipulation.  CodeLab is a plug-in that helps you write plug-ins.  CodeLab is free and open-source.

It’s hard to describe how enticing to a computer nerd the idea of “tools to build tools” is.  It’s Nerd Heaven!  The only thing better than tools to build tools would be tools to build tools to build tools.

But let’s put CodeLab to the test.  I want to shuffle the colors in an image.  I want to replace the reds with greens, the greens with blues and the blues with reds.  Here is the code inside CodeLab:

void Render(Surface dst, Surface src, Rectangle rect)
{
    ColorBgra CurrentPixel;
    ColorBgra NewPixel;
    for (int y = rect.Top; y < rect.Bottom; y++)
    {
        for (int x = rect.Left; x < rect.Right; x++)
        {
            CurrentPixel = src[x,y];
            NewPixel = CurrentPixel;
            NewPixel.R = CurrentPixel.G;
            NewPixel.G = CurrentPixel.B;
            NewPixel.B = CurrentPixel.R;
            NewPixel.A = CurrentPixel.A;
            dst[x,y] = NewPixel;
        }
    }
}

This was so easy that I wrote a few more plug-ins.  Here is how they look in the Paint.Net menu:

The rest is anticlimactic. I took a digital photo of a flower, reduced it to six different sizes, and used my new plug-ins to color-shift each size in a different way. I stacked the flowers and flattened the layers.

This is made using Microsoft Songsmith, the software that “makes it really easy to make really bad music”.  YouTube has a new genre of combining the vocals of classic hits with music written by Songsmith.  For example:

I’ve been playing with an online paint application: SUMO Paint.  There are many paint applications, and I’m not sure whether being online is a good thing or not.  I have the same reaction to all of them: there are so many features that I don’t know where to start.  All I can say is that I’ve gotten farther with SUMO Paint than I have with the others.