where we’re at
For reference, portrait sketch v.1
Portrait sketch attempt #3… sigh
Worksheet process this week; perma-reminder to self to keep thinking on paper
Let’s move — or in my case, let’s come to a weird and frustrating series of shuddering halts. My sketch is super broken!!
The current version is the least broken — and also the least revised from my original sketch. Working off of the earlier versions is showing me some places where I’m repeating mistaken assumptions about how the relationships are actually working, and helping simplify some of my ideas — but overall I don’t think starting over so many times was a great approach since it’s been harder to track where my logic is failing, and way too easy to just repeat the same mistakes in different ways. :/
Will be continuing to troubleshoot until class meets in the hopes of making it at least slightly more functional — and in the meantime, some thoughts on how this happened and what to do next!
relationships + more
- My first instinct was to anchor my variables using the elements I’d built first, which mostly meant working biggest to smallest. But when trying to think relationally and use as few real numbers as possible in my code, it was so much easier to move from smallest to biggest.
- What I needed to easily eyeball shifted! Last week, I was focused on reacting to the visual output to adjust the math; this week, I needed to focus on understanding the math in order to adjust the visual output.
- Really interesting to discover I’d chosen a lot of proportions that translated into eighths when I started looking for the relationship of canvas width + height to different coordinates! Actually creating variables that work based on that information has not been super successful; when the width + height of the canvas change to anything other than a square, relying on that relationship throws my proportions off.
- I think this points to maybe the hardest thing for me this week: really understanding which relationships are important, and which aren’t.
- Trying to transform the static numbers from last week’s code into relational variables that also made sense to my human brain was much trickier than I’d expected. I went back to square one with this week’s project several times over because each time I got to a point with the code where how I’d decided to name a certain variable or define a certain value started making the relationships on the canvas more confusing, not less.
- Not being able to see the real number values as I worked made it really difficult to troubleshoot my way out when I got turned around; keeping paper notes handy as I worked and using console.log(); often helped make this easier!
- I think part of what has made this so difficult is that I used values in my original sketch that could be expressed in multiple ways (400 is the width, but also the height, but also the diameter of my blue ellipse, etc.). I’m curious if it would have been easier to understand my mistakes more quickly if I’d given myself more distinct values to work with from the beginning.
- Another aspect of the problem has been prioritizing the static number values from last week over the actual relationships between different elements. I thought it would be more efficient to start with the clearer number relationships (i.e. a value of 100 on a 400x400 canvas) and work toward the weirder numbers, but it led to some really strange and difficult to parse arguments where I was putting something like “circleY” in an x argument for some other shape.
- I don’t know that that’s actually a problem if that accurately describes the relationship, ha! But it was super confusing for me on the editing side.
- Last but not least: my original sketch had a lot of asymmetry; this was super hard to translate relationally without getting lost.
questions for next time
- It was so tempting too to choose only the nicest, roundest relationships in order to keep the relationships as visible to my human eye as possible! At the same time: smoothing out the irregularities erased so much personality from the original sketch. When I tried to preserve them I got lost in the details and couldn’t keep track of the whole. Settled for simpler this week just to get through, but don’t want to lose sight of this tension!
- In general this week, curious what my experience would have been if I hadn’t been working off of an existing visual output — how would I go about creating an image from scratch with what I know now? What would be easier? What would be more difficult?