Siddharth Srivastava
Dew Rattanasangpunth
Fayek Abdullah
"Time in Color"

Design Statement

The intent of this project is to explore "Time in Color". We started with a background that consists of a mosaic of rectangular color tiles, that explore colors in the red to purple spectrum. This background is overlapped by swathes of color of different shapes and sizes that delineate the face of the clock, covering all the edges and setting apart a curved rhombus like region in the middle. We finally superimpose a minute and an hour hand that indicate the time and form the face of the clock. The idea behind this series of images was to explore variations in shape and color using fractals and string art. The minute and hour hand change with different values as do the background colors and string art patterns. One can imagine a sophisticated more synchronized version of the clock that changes background color and boundary patterns as time progresses. 

Technique statement

The background of the image is constructed using the tree recursion basics explored in class during the laboratory on Project Ideas. We create a color tree for the background whose content depends only on an input number 'n' using a slightly modified version of the number->color-tree procedure. We define a list of 11 colors within this modified procedure, and select colors from this list by taking the modulo of n and 11 to generate a number between 0 and 10. Hence, different values of n give us  different color trees.

We next create some string-art at the corners of the image using a modified version of the image-string-art! procedure covered in the string art homework. Our image-string-art-colors! procedure takes a list of brushes as a parameter and takes the modulo of n and 13 (number of brushes) to select from this list of brushes. The string-art pieces are centered at the 4 corners of the image and help to set apart a curved rhombus like region in the center. The individual string-art lines derive their values from a modified verision on position->color that depends on n to create new color components between 0 and 255.    

We then move on to turtle procedures to create the hour and minute hands of the clock. We used two turtles, tommy and jimmy, to make the arms. Both turtles move lengths that scale with the width and height of the image, and turn at fixed angles to make elongated parallelograms. The turtles are made to point in different directions based on the value of n, hence each arm turns depending on the value of n to give a total of 360 possible positions for each arm. The hour hand actually turns by n degrees, whereas the minute hand turns by n added to modulo of 360 and 2n (chosen arbitrarily for some variation).   

Practica/Problems:
The string-art does not scale very well, because there is a fundamental pixel size that each brush takes, which is not scalable. Thus, there is some crowding of colors in the center of the picture for smaller images. 

Similarly, the brush used for the turtles does not scale very well, and can sometimes seem larger for smaller images.