Today my fear abated, but only slightly. We reviewed some of the things we learned in the first workshop, and then dove right in to adding color. I followed along as closely as possible. I can't honestly say I've ever paid such close attention in school before. My previous degrees were English and Publishing, both of which came very easily to me. This is not that. Upon opening my computer to the still open final sketch from workshop 1, my brain had one of those spinning wheels of death and needed a reboot. Have you tried turning it off, then back on again?
We started small with learning about color theory as it applies to coding. This is where my comfortability lies, with colors. Color theory plays a massive role in my career as a tattoo artist, as well as years of art classes throughout high school and college. The thing that caught my attention most today was making random rectangles with varying colors. This is such an undersell of what it actually is. We used lines of code to make three different sized rectangles, then made them different colors. We then learned to randomize them, while saving the frames of each randomization. Using Photoshop, we made contact sheets, which is a familiar bit of terminology to me from my time of spending hours in the dark room as a photography student in my past life. This style of creating digital artwork really appealed to me. Despite it being "random", there is something really satisfying about seeing all of the, I guess you could call it, artwork created by inputting different numbers to make colors, and shapes, and placements.
One of the things I'm finding most intriguing about today's workshop was the fact that you can input even just a slightly different number and get a completely new outcome. Whether it's changing the number within the shape bracket to get a bigger, wider, taller, thinner, no outline, no fill, whatever you want and you end up with something new. Another thing that blows my mind is how much time it would take doing something like this "by hand." Meaning, for a person to make, we'll say, 16 frames of 3 random rectangular shapes, all with varying degrees of color, it would take hours and hours, and frankly the human brain is pretty bias towards colors and shapes. I personally would never put brown, turquoise, and golden yellow together, but the computer would and it actually looks pretty neat.
I'm looking forward to delving deeper into this process specifically, but I also need to nail down the basics, which oddly enough, I am still struggling with. The massive blocks of code didn't intimidate me as much as the smaller ones, for some reason. Maybe because with the bigger blocks it feels like there is less room for "error"? But again, I have to remind myself that there is really no right or wrong answers, more like experimenting until it works. As Edison famously said during his process of inventing the light bulb, "I didn't fail 1000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1000 steps." And that is how I feel about coding. There's no failure, really, just learning.
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