Creative Computing
Joel Gethin Lewis
Week 2: Lecture 3: Drawing
What I'm going to talk about now:
- Group meditation.
- Questions?
- Git and GitHub.
- Drawing on paper.
- Moving from zero spatial dimensions to one and on to two.
- Art from rules.
- Colour and colour on computers.
- Feedback.
- Homework Assignment - exercises from Code as Creative Medium - Arrays and Colour as well as introduction to p5.js
Are you recording Joel? Have you taken the register first?
2. Git and GitHub.
- Has everyone made GitHub ID's?
- Has everyone sent them to me on Slack?
2. Git and GitHub (continued).
- "Git is a distributed version-control system for tracking changes in source code during software development".
- Git is an open source piece of software that lets people all over the world share their code with each other in a way via the internet that allows them to move forward with coding separately, and then merge their different versions into a single piece of software in an organised and trackable way. Git was created by Linus Torvalds to help with the creation of the Linux kernel - another piece of software he originally created. Git is used by most (87.2% in 2018) developers to manage the development of their software.
- GitHub is a startup that makes it easier to use Git on the world wide web. Incidentally, it's owned by Microsoft who bought it in 2018 for $7.5 billion.
- Let's take a look at GitHub and talk about why it might be useful to make something like Git.
2. Git and GitHub (continued).
- Let's take a look at the frankly brilliant Daniel Shiffman's YouTube playlist:"Git for poets".
- Shall we do it now and make a rainbow poem or two?
- Before we start the tutorials, do you all have Visual Studio Code installed? If not, let's make sure everyone has done that first.
- Second, we don't have time to go through the whole playlist, but we can get a good idea of the basics. You can watch the whole playlist as your leisure. I started with GitHub just downloading the .zip files (demo) and running the applications, then I started actually compiling the code to make my own applications, before moving on to contributing my own code with something called pull requests
- Third, here are some other resources for learning about GitHub and Git: https://try.github.io/, https://guides.github.com/, https://help.github.com/en.
2. Git and GitHub (continued).
- Incidentally, I'd like to show you how I organise my files on my computer, you might find it useful, it's the result of 20 years of
- First of all, my folder structure - I have a folder for my projects, my records, my research and my personal things. I've got Time Machine working on my Mac, so I'm always backed up and also have an iCloud drive.
2. Git and GitHub (continued).
- In each any of my project/records/research/personal folders, I have a series of named folders describing each individual project.
- In each project folder I have a projectNameWorkRecord.txt and then a series of dated and named folders. The WorkRecord.txt is the diary of every project, with every email and bit of progress dated as it is being done. I also keep a Todo and Done list at the bottom of each file, as well as other important information.
- Each folder is named year_month_date_subject - for example 2019_09_25_WorkingOnLecture3. In this way, when I sort by name, I actually sort by date.
- I do this so I have a written record of the work I've done on anything, in order. This has come in useful in case of disputes about who did what, when.
3. Drawing on paper.
- Next we are going to talk about drawing, first on a piece of paper. Later, We are also going to think about the idea of dimensions - how many variables we use to describe something - the most common you've encountered so far probably being space - or the spatial dimensions.
- Before we get onto that, lets get into three's and get a piece of paper for each group and a pen each too.
- One person is going to be the model, one person is going to be the blind drawing robot and one person is going to be the sighted drawing instruction robot.
3. Drawing on paper (continued).
- Model - you have to make sure the blind drawing robot doesn't cheat, and pose your hand using a secret number of fingers.
- Blind drawing robot - listen for commands.
- Sighted drawing instruction robot - which command are you going to give first? You aren't allowed to say how many fingers the hand model is holding up, you can only say commands like "take off pen lid" or "move your hand down until I say stop".
- Go!
4. Moving from zero spatial dimensions to one and on to two.
- Starting with zero spatial (or physical space) dimensions - a point.
- Moving from zero spatial dimensions to one and on to two or going from a point to line to a square.
- Artwork: Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott.
4. Moving from zero spatial dimensions to one and on to two (continued).
- How do we describe points on a square or a flat piece of paper so that other people know where we are describing?
- Formally: (x,y) pairs are used to describe Cartesian co-ordinates in Euclidean space.
- X is for measuring how much left or right on the piece of paper, and Y is for measuring how much up or down on the piece of paper.
- Y on computers is the opposite way to the way you learnt in school - because old computers scanned from the top down using Cathode Ray Tubes.
- Area - if you double the width and the height, area scales x4 NOT x2.
- Pythagoras' theorem is used to work out how big the longest side of a triangle with a right angle in it is - see proofs on Wikipedia page and Better Explained. P.S. Better Explained is AWESOME!
4. Moving from zero spatial dimensions to one and on to two (continued).
- What is a circle? "It is the set of all points in a plane that are at a given distance from a given point".
- A Gentle Introduction To Learning Calculus from Better Explained. Calculus is the formal name for thinking about graphs - the area under a curve (or the integral) or how steep a curve is (the differential).
- Sine waves are curves that go up and down in a regular way forever.Intuitive Understanding of Sine Waves.
- How to work out the size of angles in a triangle using the lengths of a triangle or other angles aka Sine and cosine and tangent functions aka Trigonometry again, from Better Explained.
4. Moving from zero spatial dimensions to one and on to two (continued).
4. Moving from zero spatial dimensions to one and on to two (continued).
6. Colour and colour on computers.
- You can map any three variables into three dimensions to help you think about them spatially (i.e. in physical space).
- An example of this is mixing together Red, Green and Blue (RGB) colours to make any other colour.
- Digital colour mixing is additive while analogue paint mixing is subtractive.
- How does projected light mix?
- There are other ways of mixing variables to make colours - for example Hue, Saturation and Brightness (HSB).
- I often use HSB in digital work to make it easy to blend between colours - much easier than RGB. You can visualise colour using a colour wheel or a colour solid. Complementary colours are on opposite sides of the colour wheel.
- Colour theory is a huge area of study, for graphic design and even psychology.
6. Colour and colour on computers (continued).
7. Feedback
- What's working?
- What's not working?
- What am I missing?
- Lets talk now or you can Slack me in private.