For a 15 minute sketch (with a bit of cleanup afterwards) it’s not bad. The perspective is wonky all over it and my straight lines are messed up … BUT I HAVE NO REGRETS!

Because the path is random, the lines are all squirrely and bump into themselves and eachother, which is a big no-no in real electronics. But they still look pretty rad in a design.

I’ve attached a zip file with about 250 of them in 10 big PNGs – feel free to grab the package and use it for whatever you like if you think they’d be useful to you. The set gets progressively more long and curvy, until the last ones are a big bird’s nest of wires.

I’m having fun cyber-i-fying things. LOOKOUT! CYBERCLOUDS! Chh-chh-chh-chew-chew-chew-cloud. Pew pew!

I’d had a neat dream – I was looking at cells all packed closely together, jiggling and dividing with their little nuclei swimming around, and when I zoomed out a bit I saw that they were forming a picture of my face looking back at me.

So back in real life I set down to do this in code, thinking that maybe I could make a cool music video or something of singing cells. I start getting my “cell” generator working – I randomly throw a bunch of nuclei around and then “grow” cells around them that fit their bounds. In this case, the cell walls surround the region that is closest to the nearest nucleus. (I do this by drawing circles around every nucleus and connecting the intersections)

It turns out what I did was completely re-invent a well-known tesselation technique known as a Voronoi diagram. Descartes did it in 1644, making me about 400 years late to the party. In fact, there’s already an optimized Voronoi library for Processing that does everything I want in one function call.

Right. So maybe at least my cell face thing is something new, then, eh? If I distribute the nuclei around in a pattern that’s more dense in dark spots and less dense in light spots…

Oh Canada!

So now my cells are totally making pictures, just like in my dream! I invented something really cool! Except this guy invented exactly the same thing eleven years ago, there’s a flickr gallery full of voronoi portraits, and there’s even already a plugin for the Gimp.

So my completely original dream idea is in fact a spot-on reproduction of someone else’s idea that builds on an idea from 1644. I feel like the Elisha Grey of voronoi portraits.

This reminds me of the Wii game “De Blob” that I’ve been completely in love with since Christmas. There’s something about big bold walls of primary colours that appeals to me deep in my core.

Speed-drawing costumes in five minutes is considerably harder than drawing nudes, but even knowing that it was still a soul-crushing, frustrating experience. I managed to get two or three decent drawings out of the night, but I’m out of practice (again) and most of my drawings sucked badly. I recognise that I’ll only see improvement through practice,  but this one was tough. Meh. Pep talks welcome at this point.

Here’s one of the better images, with a splash of colour courtesy of photoshop to distract you from all my screwups.

The first one, a huge green caterpillar, which was nearly the length of my hand, probably 5 inches long, was crawling along on the sidewalk next to the Carlingwood mall. There was no fuzz on him, just a weird light green crisscross stripe that looked like a woodworker’s inlay. Beautiful pattern! I saw him while I was walking over to the mall without my camera, and desperately wanted to get a picture, but wasn’t sure what to do – carry him with me into the Bell store? “Hello. Fix my internet, damn you, or I’ll sick my giant man-eating caterpillar on you.” It was quickly resolved for me though – a bird flew down and snatched him away. A big bird.

The second one was large for a caterpillar but not as huge as the first one – I spotted him just outside the door of my building after biking home. “Aha!” I yelled, “I have my camera with me this time!” So I ripped my camera out of my bag, knelt down at the side of the road, and as I did this, a crazy lady who was waiting for someone by the door in her van peeled out and drove over it. Twice. Inches away from me. Cater-Murdered. He burst into a big pile of green goo, leaving me traumatized for life. All I got was a picture of the car tire. Who does that? Who drives over a creature that someone is clearly trying to take a picture of? Caterpillar pyscho-lady, that’s who.

Anyone want to try to identify these as best you can given my probably somewhat inaccurate proportions?

I read that there was a sidewalk chalk rebellion a few years ago in the Glebe – some kids got fined for doodling on the pavement and the entire neighborhood came out to scribble in solidarity.  I’ve been keeping my eyes peeled for a yearly event but haven’t spotted one yet.

I got to witness a really cool Model T Ford meetup at Monkey Joe’s, there were about 10 of them lined up facing Carling in the parking lot, and a bunch of old guys comparing wooden wheel diameters. Beautiful paint jobs and excellent restoration work on all of them. I hope it’s a recurring event, I’d love to get some detail shots of all the chrome and custom metalwork.

Then I saw someone dressed up in a monkey suit outside of Mark’s Work Wearhouse dancing around and trying to get people to come into the store – not really picture-worthy but odd enough that I wished Natasha could have seen it. (It turns out she saw him too on the bus ride home.)

So I’ve learned my lesson – I’m going to fuse my camera to my arm somehow. Meanwhile, here’s a 7-minute sketch of the dancing monkey guy… EXACTLY as it happened. In black and white for maximum artistic effect.