Category: 04-Hatching

My set of hatches:

Sketches of hatching ideas

Comments:
I wish I spent a little more time this week refining the hatches and improving the details, and personality, of them. I think they are a passable representation of the 3 sketches that I picked from. Not completely satisfied with this work, but it responds to the prompt.

The first hatching method is just a bunch of smiley faces in a grid. The second is a bunch of circles in a grid. The third is some vertical lines, but I added so random lines offset by an amount ranging from 0 to the width of the square grid. The last one is a set of three bezier curves. I didn’t use any external code apart from the grid set up posted in easement 2. I think the difficulty came with trying to make sure they were all the same amount of dark. The third row was especially hard to tune because the vertical lines just appeared so much lighter than the other rows, in part because the colors still looked separate.

Scan of the print (lol):

import processing.svg.*;

float[] percentList = {0.10, 0.30, 0.50, 0.70, 0.90};
int nSquares = percentList.length;

void setup() {
  size(800, 800);
}

void draw() {
  background(250);
  int now = millis();
  randomSeed(now);
  beginRecord(SVG, "foo_" + now + ".svg");
  noFill();
  int offset = (height/4 - int(width/nSquares))/2;
  grid(offset, 0);
  grid(height/4 + offset, 1);
  grid(height/2 + offset, 2);
  grid(3*height/4 + offset, 3);

  endRecord();
  noLoop();
}

void keyPressed() {
  loop();
}


void grid(int posY, int func) {
  for (int i=0; i<nSquares; i++) {
    float rS = width/nSquares;
    float rL = i*rS;
    float rR = rL + rS;
    float rT = posY;
    float rB = rT + rS;

    float hatchPercent = percentList[i];
    float nLinesToDraw = round(hatchPercent * rS/3.2);
    if(func==0) nLinesToDraw = round(hatchPercent * rS/2.3);
    if(func==1) nLinesToDraw = round(hatchPercent * rS/1.8);
    if(func==2) nLinesToDraw = round(hatchPercent * rS/3);
    float offset = (rS/nLinesToDraw)/2;

    // Vertical line version
    for (int j=0; j<nLinesToDraw; j++) {
      for (int k=0; k<nLinesToDraw; k++) {
        float lx = map(j, 0, nLinesToDraw, rL, rR);
        float ly = map(k, 0, nLinesToDraw, rT, rB);
        switch(func) {
        case 0:
          hatch_1(lx+offset, ly+offset, offset);
          break;
        case 1:
          hatch_2(lx, ly, offset);
          break;
        case 2:
          hatch_3(lx+offset, map(min(k+1, nLinesToDraw), 0, nLinesToDraw, rT, rB)+ random(-0.5,0.5), map(max(k-1, 0), 0, nLinesToDraw, rT, rB)+ random(-0.5,0.5));
          hatch_3(min(max(rL,lx + random(-0.5, 0.5)*offset),rR), map(min(k+1, nLinesToDraw), 0, nLinesToDraw, rT, rB)+ random(-0.5, 0.5), map(max(k-1, 0), 0, nLinesToDraw, rT, rB)+ random(-0.5,0.5));
          break;
        case 3:
          hatch_4(lx, ly, offset);
          break;
        }


        //hatch_1(lx,ly);
      }
    }
  }
}

void hatch_1(float posX, float posY, float rad) {
  float smile_start = random(0, QUARTER_PI);
  float n = random(0.3,1) * 3*PI/4;
  float radX = random(0.5,1)*rad*2;
  float radY = random(0.5,1)*rad*2;
  arc(posX, posY, radX, radY, smile_start, smile_start +QUARTER_PI+n);
  circle(posX + random(-0.25,0)*rad,posY+ random(-0.2,0.2)*rad,1);
  circle(posX + random(0,0.25)*rad,posY+ random(-0.2,0.2)*rad,1);
}

void hatch_2(float posX, float posY,float offset) {
  circle(posX+offset, posY+offset, offset);
}

void hatch_3(float posX, float inc1, float inc2) {
  line(posX, inc2, posX, inc1);
}

void hatch_4(float posX, float posY, float offset) {
  bezier(posX,posY,posX+2*offset - random(1)*2*offset, posY+2*offset,posX+random(1)*2*offset,posY,posX+2*offset, posY+2*offset);
  bezier(posX+offset,posY,posX+2*offset - random(1)*offset, posY+offset,posX+random(1)*offset,posY,posX+2*offset, posY+offset);
  bezier(posX,posY+offset,posX+offset - random(1)*offset, posY+2*offset,posX+random(1)*offset,posY,posX+offset, posY+2*offset);
}

Hatching studies:

Screenshot:

SVG:

Reflection:

I wasn’t super engrossed by this programming assignment, and I was sort of busy this week so some of these are slightly uninspired. I did think I was being silly/clever with the second row, which is a bunch of people, because Golan described hatching as “approximating gray tones using assemblies of lines“, and I usually think of a bunch of people when I think of the word assembly 🙂

I was told that the third row looked like the effects from super paper mario and the fourth one looked like the patterns on couches from the 80’s, which I thought was really funny. I like these kinds of patterns:

They’re so funny and garish. I could figure out a way to make a fun background for myself in the spirit of these designs. Anyway I’m not really on topic anymore.

Credit: I used this library to export an SVG from p5js.

(It’s blue because of VPype)

I really enjoyed doing this project, it felt like a fun throwback to drawing exercises and it made me think a lot about how materiality might connect with hatching and values. I wish I had utilized some more specific patterns, like the examples we saw in class with dithering or truchet tiles. But I was having too much fun with the patterns I had already chosen.

I also want to give attribution to Dan Schiffman’s video on the Hilbert Curve, which I adapted to create the fractal pattern in the first block.

Sketches:

First Iteration: