I have thoroughly been enjoying messing with my wife’s lovely photos the last couple of days. Her studies in the spring flora have inspired me to try to manipulate them to look like some of her favorite painters. Manet, Monet, Degas, Cassatt… on and on. I personally am an abstract expressionism fan, Klee, Kandinsky, etc., but I thought it might be fun to see what I could do with a minimal amount of code and some great source images. While certainly not a complete study, they are at least a nice diversion from some other work I have been doing lately. Read on to see more.

The basic premise of these pieces are as such… Load a bitmap, select a pixel, sample it’s color. Chose a pixel offset from that original by a number within a set range. Repeat a third time and then draw a variant weight lineGradientStyle colored line using that created gradient from the origin point to the final point sampled. After that’s complete, blur it, cache it as a bitmap and put it on stage. We do this about 15,000 times using a timer to produce an image.

To add to the feel, I mix up the sample areas and the overall “accuracy” of the sample by choosing a angle for the line within a narrow range and seeding a few of the gradients with slightly off-kilter color information by sampling a neighbor of the pixel rather than the true color that should actually be sampled for that mid-tone. This creates a little more personality in the gradient blends and helps to avoid a bit of the mechanized look. The three tone gradient also helps with this effect.

Take a look at some early results.

Lilac

Japanese Maple

Posted on May 4, 2008