We started drawing with colour today, here are a few sketches.

Yinka Shonibare, Black Gold, wall painting with stretch fabric attachments, at Stephen Friedman Gallery, London

Jonathan Lasker, The Equality of Apples and Oranges, oil on linen, 2007, at Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin

Jon Pylypchuk, Let Me Hold You in the Water For These Last Moments, mixed media on panel, 2007, with detail below; not sure of gallery

Andre Butzer, Untitled 12, oil on canvas, 2007, at Hetzler Gallery, Berlin

Arturo Herrero, Orfeo, 2007 Medium is not given, but it’s felt, so you can call it sculpture or painting. In either case it fits under the umbrella of Material Abstraction

Sirous Namazi, Untitled, iron and enamel paint, 2007, at Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm

Antony Gormley works on paper and sculpture at Sean Kelly, New York

Arcangelo Sassolino, Untitled, modified hydraulic steel grapple, 2007, at VonSenger, Zurich. Presumably the tool and the drawing on the poured cement floor comprise the work

Here are some of the works from the past few weeks of Mixed Media

Tonight I tried screen printinng for the first time

Quite interesting indeed.

I was exploring ways to create simple facial expressions in Context Free on the internet when I stumbled upon a very interesting script.

http://strix.org.uk/contextfree/

Although it’s not relevant to what I want to do for my final project, I found it interesting how an entire image can be generated purely of black dots of different sizes.

I find it grossly impractical creating code for this image, as there is a large amount of repetition the code but interesting all the same.

[source code]

The idea of customising a bag seems so simple - find a picture and print it on there.

However, the bag you get isn’t quite so customisable after all.

I was using the bag customiser at zazzle.com and I realised that there were very few options available to the consumer. Although you could upload any image you wanted onto the design of the bag, I found myself very restricted by the area you could place the design on. I found that the limited canvas dramatically deduced the number of images that I could place on the bag. Another limitation I found was the lack of colours and styles available. What was on offer was very genereic and the colour that I did want was out of stock, which was greatly inconvenient.

Zazzle prides itself on its simplicity and ease of creating a custom product, but I found their interface slightly confusing to start with, as there was alot of lag in the system and the clickable buttons were sometimes misleading. I was also annoyed that there was little you could do in regards to the editing the image design once you had uploaded it, so you would have to edit it on your computer and then upload it once again.

Mass customisation is the use of flexible computer-aided manufacturing systems to produce custom output. In a society of ever growing individualism, it has become extremely important for people to have items and serviced developed to suit their needs and wants. Mass customisation allows people to combine the flexibility of an individual customisation, with low unit costs.

I was inspired to create a mass customisation system for plushies and keychains while I was visiting the Blood Design Market at the Powerhouse Museum a few weeks ago as part of Sydney Design 08. One stand that particularly caught my eye was a stand selling plushies and keychains, amongst other things by a Thai designer known as ‘Idealist’ [link]. Although her designs were intuitive, I didn’t like the idea of having a personal toy knowing that other people would have the identical toy as me.

I was looking on the internet and I was amazed at the lack of generators there were for customisable plushies, in comparison to the large number of sites that claim that they will customise a plushie for you. Most of the websites available were very limited in regards to being able to see the final product before actually putting in an order.

Other limitations included the range of plushies to base designs on and the time that it took for the customer to see the final product. Customers were also restricted to the colour of the toy and the text and/or image that is embroidered or screen printed onto the toy. This is usually substantial for the purposes of promotional work or use an fundraising, but it isn’t very personal, especially when it comes to creating personalised toys as a gift for a friend or loved one.

I found a custom toy website at granadatoys.com [link] where the user gets full input to how their toy will look, and the customer is even sent a prototype of the toy before the manufacturing of the actual toy exists. However, this is a lenghty process and the price of the toy is not known until a later stage.

I also found a website for a really good store at buildabear.com.au [link] where you can customise your own toys, choosing from a range of available options. I think that it is really practical and hands on, and I would like to base much of my customisation on these stages, although the style of toy isn’t what I am after.

The online tool that I found most similar to the plushies that I would like to be producing on a large scale was a South Park generator from sp-studio.de [link]. I like how you could customise all the body parts and choose the colours of the skin and clothes, and then add accessories to that as well. I also liked how you could see what you were working on, although it would be nice of you could see more than 1 view of the character that you are creating.

Finally, I was exploring on contextfreeart.org and found some code that allowed me to genereate simple shapes in a manner for them to look like faceial expressions. I thought that it would be practical to try and implement those shapes into my mass customisation.

code for the faces: faces.cfdg

I would like to be able to create a system where users will be able to create completely custom toys, in they style that I had mentioned. I would like for colour, size, fabric and firmness of the toy to all be decided by the consumer.

CODING:

marked_shapes

outline_shapes

distorted_checkerboard_rug2

Open all 3 files in “Context Free” and press render while in “distorted_checkerboard_rug2” for more variations.

I just had to mess around with “Context Free” coding today to see what I could come up with.

Original: [link]

Altered:

Code:

background {b -.5}
 
startshape CHIAROSCURO
 
rule CHIAROSCURO {
    BLACK {b .4}
}
 
rule BLACK 60 {
    CIRCLE {s .6}
    BLACK {x .1 r 5 s .99 b -.01 a -.01}
}
rule BLACK {
    WHITE {}
    BLACK {}
}
 
rule WHITE 50 {
    CIRCLE {s .7}
    WHITE {x .1 r -5 s .99 b .01 a -.005}
}
rule WHITE {
    BLACK {}
    WHITE {}
}

Last week me did ‘advanced fingerpainting’ for mixed media, this week we took the images we created and made collages.

Click here for more mixed media.

For Generative Design Systems we were required to find an online customisation tool and create our own design.

This is a quick one that I created on the Vans website.

I found that this interface was extremely easy to use, although it did lag so you didn’t know what the shoe would look like immediately which was annoying. The other problem is that there weren’t many choices available and the patterns that we could use were very generic.
I found that they all suited the design of the shoe, although it wasn’t as advanced as other custom shoe generators I’ve used in the past.