Recitation 6: Processing Basics by Guangbo Niu

"Several  Circles" by Vasily Kandinsky
“Several Circles” by Vasily Kandinsky

To be honest, I chose this image because it seemed simple enough. When I saw the list of recommended sources, I suddenly realized Bauhaus School of Arts would be my top choice because 1)I didn’t know much about processing so I could only create something simple and 2) Bauhaus, as far as I am concerned, is the role model in the artist world for simplicity. Then I clicked in to the Bauhaus website and searched for images within my capacity. And at the bottom of the first page, I found “Several Circles” by Russian artist Vasily Kandinsky –  it consists mostly of circles, seeming easy enough. 

At this initial stage of learning Processing, I didn’t want to bring too much trouble to myself so I decided to directly emulate my motif, which I thought would be a simple task. To emulate this, the ellipse function is the main tool for me. So I began to draw circles using ellipse function. With every circle, I carefully adjusted its size/color/location by changing the parameters, which turned out to be a painful task. On average I spent 2 minutes on each circle.

As the process continued, I realized that instead of absolute location, I may use relative location to make my job easier. So I decided to add annotations in the codes of each circle to indicates its location in the motif. And then when I drew the next circle, I could easily confirm its location and size by comparing to the last circle I drew.

In addition, when I kept drawing, I realized that RGB color is not enough to represent the original color – I also needed transparency. So I asked Rudi how to make that happen and he told me about the alpha value, which indicates the transparency.

My work
My work
My code
My code

Due to lack of time, I only accomplished 50% of the original work. If I had more time, it would look similar to the original motif in general since the main point of that art is circles. However, I noticed that Processing could not realize some subtle things in the original work such as the blurred margins, although it is a good tool to realize the design in general.

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