AMY E MARTIN // Blog

I don't know when this happened but it is now much easier and faster for me to create certain kinds of complex illustrations with Processing than with Illustrator. Weird.

So a network in the context of the assignment I'm working on (go school!) is basically just interconnected units. This needn't have any hierarchy but for whatever reason I chose hierarchy (and now that I type that, I'm going to have to do a non-hierarchical sketch. I kinda can't stand unexplored rocks). So, right now a subunit connects to a main unit which then connects to another main unit which can connect back down to a subunit. I sketched this in my sketchbook, then immediately went to Illustrator and started putting together the sketch.

To be fair, I am quite solid with Illustrator but I don't know the nuances of it the way I know Photoshop and Indesign. There may be a macro-ish function that would allow me to use Illustrator to generate a random number of random beziers which emanate from a single point and then to interconnect each single point with x number of other sets of bezier "flowers." I don't know how to do this, however, and so I would've done the entire sketch by hand and it would've taken me a significantly longer amount of time than it took me to write a Processing program that did the same thing. (That, I wrote in 30 minutes).

And when sketching other parts of the assignment, I can take the same Processing sketch, add two lines of code and have a new sketch. Working with Eclipse lately has definitely shown me how specific (and simple) Processing is in comparison. I am certainly no expert and probably never will be and it's taken 9 months of near daily stammering and cursing to even be vaguely proficient but compare that to the years of study it takes to become a good programmer and I feel like I've found a very pleasant middle ground.

Labels: processing, programming, school work