Headspin (Doodle by Geo Davis with Mr. Doob’s Harmony procedural drawing tool)
This morning (if 3-something AM is morning rather than purgatory) sleep abandoned me and I flitted a bit while the most incredible orange orb settled into the Jemez Mountains. Maybe I was moonstruck. Or just lucky to be insomniac, to be witness to the most magnificent moon dance I’ve spectated in a while.
Somewhere, somehow between mugs of tea swirling steam paisleys into the darkness I stumbled backward into the cobwebby, petroglyphic rabbit doodle that refuses to fade into 2012 where it was born, where it belongs. I think of that shadowy hare as a digital doodle, but others more clever than I might refer to the underlying technology (no, not my peculiar imagination, but the techy tool acting as midwife) as a “procedural drawing tool”. Five or so years ago I used The Scribbler (a once online but now defunct procedural drawing tool) to waft the rabbit and spidery sailboat out of the ether.
Although The Scribbler has headed off in pursuit of the dodo, there are other free, online procedural drawing tool options for you to experiment with. I’ve used Harmony by Mr. Doob (mrdoob.com /@mrdoob) to create the digital doodle examples in this post. Another resource to check out is SuperSketchy.
Leap (Doodle by Geo Davis with Mr. Doob’s Harmony procedural drawing tool)
Off to brew up another pot of tea, but first a “What if?” consideration (Hat tip to my nephew, Erik!) to jumpstart your creative superpowers.
- What if there were a handy way to record those ephemeral steam doodles swirling above your tea/coffee cup?
- What if there were a procedural drawing tool that could translate just barely mists and smoke and clouds into illustrations?
- What if a still/video camera (the two closest pretenders to the procedural drawing tool I’m conjuring) could record the beginning-to-ending image as an intricate line drawing?
I’m ever-intrigued by the notion of found art, and I find the possibility of morphing an image or a gesture directly from one mirage-like state into a line drawing. Into a print…
