The assignment
We had to create “our own screen drawing: self-portrait, alien, monster, etc. Use 2D primitive shapes – arc(), curve(), ellipse(), line(), point(), quad(), rect(), triangle() – and basic color functions – background(), colorMode(), fill(), noFill(), noStroke(), stroke(). Remember to use createCanvas() to specify the dimensions of your window and wrap all of your code inside a setup() function.”
My approach
I wasn’t sure at first what to draw. I knew I wanted to do a self-portrait, but it’s hard to draw yourself with code. Especially when you are a newbie. At first I tried drawing myself from the side and it was horrible. I scrapped it, thought long and hard, and then I had my ‘a-ha!’ moment. I thought, “well why not combine this with something that I already know?” So, I combined my GIMP (an open-source image editing software, definitely check out) skills with p5. I picked out a photo that I recently used for my NYU ID card, simplified the colors and put a threshold on the values between black and white, so that I have minimal colors and finally pixelated the whole images to break it down into tiles of 5×5 pixels:
my id photo pixelated in black and white 
my ID photo
“I am the most brilliant man on earth!” I thought to myself gleefully, thinking that this will be simple. Nope. It took 7.5-8 hours. I felt like Bart Simpson in the opening of The Simpsons.
The process
I used only the fill() function and used rect() as my tiles of 5×5. I basically went from left to right and where it wasn’t white (there was so much grey, I am going to dream in blends of grey I am sure of it) I filled it in. So all in all, I basically worked with negative space. The Measure tool and the Color Picker in Gimp did wonders for me because they told me exactly what pixel and what color I am working with.
The first half of the face took extremely long. About 5 hours, the other half with black pixels mostly took the rest of time. I do think I kind of sped up at some point. I wanted to give up 6 times, but I knew I had to complete the assignment.
The outcome
Since I worked with a black and white image it turned out a little boring. To make it a little more interesting I decided to give myself a red eye Terminator style.
Lessons learned
- Marking code with double slashes “//” was extremely useful. A few times I put in the wrong color and didn’t realize until after, but finding it was extremely easy because I knew which x-point I am on.
- Never do this again.
- Never do this again.
- Armin van Buuren is the best in trance.
How computation applies to my interests
Honestly, I don’t know. I used to alter code, but was never able to create code. I don’t have that bone in me. I never thought “oh I can write my own plug-in for this Community Management System”, I always thought “oh look how many awesome plug-ins there are available on somewebsitename dot com”. I was always busy managing a community or a website and I was able to deliver that way. My friend actually did code and he would request images from me and I would provide them. Henry Ford is credited with assembly line production and it works. We split jobs and therefore are able to accomplish them faster.
The lukewarmness I have for computation comes from not understanding it. It’s pure ignorance and I want to learn more. I attended the ml5 sessions on Friday and it was quite interesting. I really liked all the cool processes and tools people created. I would like to learn how to make them.
