DSDN 142: Playing Around With The Pattern Maker

So, one of the first things we got to do towards our new project was have a play around with the pattern maker that was made by one of the previous Victoria students.

What it allows you to do is essentially input a "pattern" that you want to repeat, and then have it repeated across the canvas that you define. The code that does the hard work is a series of loops that takes what you have created and repeats it.

To create these more random "noisy" patterns, I put in a random element into my code, so that the shapes would all be shifted by a random element.

In this pattern, I randomised the arcs, still with their fill remaining, and also randomised the positions and dimensions of the arcs. This creates an apparent chaos, with a huge variety of arc lengths. 

I then went further and added some colour into the mix. It's a horrible colour to use as a background wash, but might be rather nice to use in future as a highlight or special colour.

In the next sequence, I went on and created a pattern made entirely of lines. The starting points of each line remained the same, however, the end points of each line had an added random element. Another thing I experimented with in this one was trying out colour randomisation.
Because complete colour randomisation looks like crap, I decided to inhibit the randomisation by using a bracketed randomisation, thereby limiting the randomisation to a small margin around a certain colour.

I replicated the bracketed randomisation of colour again in this test, and brought back the arcs, that had a more prominent fill to them than the lines.

I decided to try some experiments with squares here, and overlaid them over the top of the one before that had the lines on it. The squares provide an interesting geometry, because I also applied a randomised stroke weight on the squares, which results in a large range of size, and almost gives the sense of movement in the code.

Due to the previous one being applied over the top of a line-based pattern before, in this one I simplified it all down and made a grid of squares of all the same size, and just applied a variable stroke weight to the pattern.

For next time, I'm going to be creating my own series of loops to start creating my own patterns of structure and noise!