I've maxed out my allowance on puns about spiralling...

I’m an artist and creative technologist. I write about generative art, code, creativity and other interconnected topics. You can expect a diary on Fridays sharing the things I’ve been working on. Thanks for joining me here. 💖

Hello!

This week seems to have flown past, I almost didn’t realise it was newsletter day!

I had a fun week because I made a timelapse video of my spiral handwriting being plotted on Tuesday and it has had quite a lot of engagement which sounds very online and like something a person shouldn’t care about but, actually, getting people to look at my art is kind of the whole point for me.

Things I’ve done this week

Spiral Handwriting Plots

Here’s the piece that was in the video that got super popular.

And here’s where you can watch the video of it being made:

Instagram | Twitter | TikTok | Youtube

(TikTok is where it took off the most, with over 120k views right now).

I’ve also plotted a few more pieces since then!

And here are some close ups!

Features like tilting and stretching the letters existed before the spirals, but had been based on upright text. I shifted the letters in respect to the canvas (e.g. along the x axis to tilt). With spiral text, every letter is at a different angle so I’ve had to alter the way I calculate these changes.

While working on stretching letters along the path of the word, I ran into a bug. It’s caused by the fact that angles go up to 360 and then back round to 0 again. It means it’s sometimes hard to work out things like whether one angle is between two others. (e.g. 10° is clearly between 5° and 15°… but is 10° between 340° and 40°?)

Not sure if that makes sense but it doesn’t really matter, I’ve fixed it! But while it was broken, it produced these cool scribbles!

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That’s all, thanks again for joining me!

I’ll leave you with this shot of the back of my current embroidery (something I do in the evenings) and I’ll see you here next week.

Amy ⭐