tag: Text

In the years that I’ve been creating things in Pure Data I have amassed quite a collection of unfinished and messy patches. Over the next few days I’ll be releasing a few of these patches and techniques that I implement when programming in Pure Data.

Randomise Text

In the early 2010s I had quite an interest in zines. I had co-organised the Birmingham Zine Festival and was quite regularly reading this. As a result of this in 2011 I started collaborating with a friend, Rebecca Evans, on a collaborative zine. The concept is that we would interpret each others’ way of working using our regularly used tools. Rebecca specialises in textiles and has quite a skill at crocheting, amongst other things. I, on the other hand, can barely operate a sewing machine and feel much more at home using a soldering iron or computer.

For my set for From Digbeth With Hammers at BOYD 8 I was required to display their logo on screen. This sounds like it should be a relatively easy task, but their logo consisting of four lines of text presented some interest problems.

In Pure Data there’s three objects you can use to display text on-screen: [text2d], [text3d] and [textextruded]. They have different ways of receiving text input, which I’ll get onto later, but one of the common methods that I often utilise in this scenario is by using a symbol box. In addition to receiving symbols Symbol boxes can be used to input text by just clicking on the box and typing text. Hitting Enter sends that text to its outlet. This presented a slight problem.

I’ve been messing around with Inkscape a lot recently and have found a few cool tricks. This all originally started as an attempt to recreate an effect I saw on the Inkscape website but quickly evolved into something different.

Here’s an example of the output I achieved.

What’s interesting about this is that it’s mostly the work of filters. For this tutorial we’ll be working with text in Inkscape 0.47pre0. To illustrate things better use a font that is very think. Even Arial Black will do. Create two different text objects

This is my submission for the Illustration Friday topic, Vacant

I interpreted vacant to mean blank and with that came the image of a blank piece of paper. A blank paper is very daunting to many artists and it’s no different with me. However if I start at a paper and think long enough usually ideas just start to come out at me. I portrayed this by using very light colours for the lettering and scenery.

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Under some very handy advice from some wise people I’ve gone back and given all of my pieces names. Seems only right that I should name them, afterall I wouldn’t name my child ‘Untitled’! Only three more of these to go, then you’ll see some work that’s more akin to graffiti.

Completed this one recently

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I’m liking the way this style is going, but I want to incorporate people and other objects into it, rather than just abstract objects and text. It’s proving challenging to make the two work together, but it’ll happen with more practice ;-)