I’ve been making some art recently.
Years ago, I came across an artist called Matt Bilfield creating digital interactive generative art on Art Blocks. He published a project called Transitions, which contained a few thousand randomly generated digital artworks.
They are these little virtual pegboards. Some are round, some are square, some have a few hundred pegs, some thousands. The properties are all based on an underlying algorithm with a bunch of attributes. The pegs move up and down, and change colour, and you could view them in 3D space.
A screenshot of
Transitions #4067Here’s an example of one you can try: https://generator.artblocks.io/117004067
You can even generate your own works from the same algorithm. I thought this was all pretty cool! Yes, they are NFTs. Yes, on the whole NFTs are pretty lame. But I still think there is Something Interesting There for digital art (but that’s another topic for another day).
What was also interesting to me was that Matt made physical pieces of art too.
Go check out his website! They are lovely.
I thought this was very cool, and staring at these pegboards, I also thought “I wonder how he did that! Could I do that…?”
2021
As many of these idle thoughts go, I started by just throwing some shapes around in Illustrator. Here is one I made in September 2021:
I quickly realised that in order to get the rows of pegs aligned correctly, I had to have a formula that would dictate how to arrange these shapes in this pleasing geometry, where the rows of pegs line up properly.
So I did what any person who’s been on a computer for too long would do; I made a spreadsheet.
Not particularly complex, but every new ring on the circle adds 6 pegs. You then calculate a rotation value, so that the amount of pegs in the new ring fits into the 360 degrees of a circle. This would dictate how far you would rotate your peg away from the diameter relative to the centre point.
Rotate and copy the green circle 36 degrees to get the placement of the red circle. Then another 36 degrees, then another, until you have this:
Now repeat that for like, a bunch of rings. Here is 26 rings, 2054 pegs total.
Now repeat the process of making this big circle a bunch of times, tweaking the values (like distance between the pegs, peg size, distance between the pegs in the middle, the padding at the edge) over and over and over until you get something you like.
Now I’ve got some shapes, but I don’t have any colours. Looking at some of the colours in the Transitions pieces on Art Blocks, I thought that sticking within a theme would be a helpful way to generate some colour palettes. Here’s one I did off a cute purple monster:
Google Lens tells me that this purple monster was a from project called “Weak Vision Freaks“. I think i was just looking around Dribbble for interesting colours and found it there. I sampled a bunch of the colours in the pic to create some Swatches, then used this randomise fill swatch script I found on GitHub to randomly assign colours to the objects.
Nice! But I don’t really just want to create something that’s just random — I wanted something a bit less abstract.
I tried building some versions with photos as inspiration, then splitting the image into thirds, and assigning specific colours to the top third, middle third, and bottom third, and then blended them together a bit.
I don’t mind this! It would probably look great on a wall in the right house.
All these little prototypes were all made around September 2021. But after a while, I parked these explorations (we also had a second kid during this time, so you know, spare time not really at a premium) and I didn’t do anything else with it until like, April 2024.
2024
Literal years later, I started thinking about finding a creative outlet again, and went back to these early bits and pieces I had knocked up in Illustrator. I started thinking again about the steps of actually building a work of my own.
In rough order of operations:
- Finalise a design (doable)
- Buy a bunch of pegs (no idea)
- Build a backboard (no idea)
- Paint the pegs (how hard could it be)
- Assemble the board (maybe easy? hope so)
Here are some design notes after I decided to pick it back up.
I decided a circle with a diameter of 34 pegs (for a total of 884 pegs in the entire design) would be achievable and still impressive. After messing with some variables I landed on a backboard that was around 450mm in diameter. Here are two of them.
My wife Jean suggested that I try creating a design based on the album cover from Texas Sun, a short EP by Khruangbin and Leon Bridges which we both love. This was actually one of the last big decisions in the entire project; I had not settled on the actual colours and placement until quite late.
I bought the pegs on AliExpress (I bought 1000 pieces of 8mm diameter, 10cm length, birch wooden dowels), because buying the wooden dowels from Bunnings and then having to accurately cut 884 of them to the right length was both more expensive, more time consuming, and a high degree of me stuffing it up.
I found a local business in Brisbane that does CNC Routing to create the backboard. Shoutout to Dipak from Vs Cutting Solutions who helped me a lot of that part of the design! Working with Dipak meant that I expanded the holes in the design from 8.0mm to 8.2mm, so the pegs fitted snugly but not too tight. The backboard was made in 17mm form ply, and I also changed my mind and opted to drill 10mm deep holes instead of all the way through the board. This also saved my bacon, because doing it the other way would have been a disaster.
I was also lucky in that working in Illustrator meant that I had an easy way to export the design to a DXF file, which is what the CNC cutting machine wants.
Originally I tried painting the pegs by spray painting them, but I wasn’t happy with the results. They were inconsistent and streaky (sidenote: I am probably bad at spray painting), and considering the design I had in mind, buying multiple cans of spray paint would be quite expensive. I also wanted a method where I could paint, watch TV, and hang out with my wife, instead of spending time alone in my garage.
In the end I settled on using Posca pens, which are awesome and come in a variety of nice bright colours. My only problem was that I bought a 15 pack of colours with a 5M rounded tip.
This is objectively the wrong pen for the job of painting many hundreds of short pegs. I have since discovered that they do a 15 pack of the 8K chisel tip pens, and buying that version from the start would have saved me dozens of hours of painting time. Oh well! All told I probably spent a month painting pegs, around 20-30 a night.
For the colours that I needed literal hundreds of pegs (like black and white), I went to Officeworks and bought some 8K Posca chisel tip pens there, and that sped things up.
The white pegs needed a double-coat too, brutal.
Once all the pegs were painted, bagged, and ready to go, the assembly process came together quite quickly. I used a tiny dab of wood glue at the end of each peg to secure them in place in the backboard.
The iPad was really useful as a guide, so I didn’t get tripped up and put the wrong peg in the wrong spot.
Hey, look. It’s me!
Some of them were loose, some of them were really snug and I had to tap into place. When you buy an “8mm” wooden dowel you are in reality getting anywhere between 7.8mm-8.2mm. Not the end of the world.
My next challenge will be figuring out how to hang it on the wall, and a few touch-ups to some of the front surface of a couple of the pegs that were tapped in.
Overall I really enjoyed making this, and hope you enjoyed reading about it! Texas Moon next?
https://jamescroft.website/2024/07/05/texas-sun/
#4067
