When I was a kid in the 90s, we had a crappy black and white dot matrix printer that sometimes would run low on ink causing streaks or advance the paper a bit too far causing thin gaps. I always loved the imperfection of these prints, they seemed to have so much character and depth. Sometimes we would color on them with crayons or markers. This image to the right is from an actual picture of batman I printed about 30 years ago, and it shows some of those printing issues.
My concept for Dithered Branches was to simulate a lo-fi fantasy printer from the 80s, use that to print a generative landscape scene, then make it beautiful by applying color. Instead of just using the classic dot matrix style printer, I implemented Floyd-Steinberg dithering and exaggerated the printing errors. For my subject I chose a tree in front of a rocky space landscape.
There is a great amount of variety to this piece. Some have dead trees with missing branches, others have no tree at all. Most printers use dithering, some are slightly broken, others are even glitched out, and there is a small chance for dot matrix printers or even HD laser prints. To add even more permutations there are several color and paper options.
Just to reiterate because this piece is a bit confusing. All of these results are outputs directly from the same program. They were never printed by a real printer or painted with real paint. I haven’t even opened most of them up in an image editor! With that said, please enjoy…
Keep reading for more info and analysis of the piece…
Continue reading