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…

Dithered Branches on fxhash

Keep reading for more info and analysis of the piece…

My generative work “Broken Flows” is my deep dive into flow fields and even more so paint brushes and color palette generators. Very excited about how this one turned out and the tech I am developing for future pieces.

Broken Flows on fxhash

More Info

I have dabbled with some flow fields on before and found them an interesting subject for generative art. In June I posted a few tiny programs on dwitter, here is my favorite. The special thing about this flow field is that it uses the tiny equation sin(x^y) that make artifacts from xor function visible.

F=_=>((1-X%1)*S(X^Y)+X%1*S(X+1^Y))*30
for(k=2e3,B=t*9,A=B**3%k;k--;x.fillRect(A+=C(b=F(Y=B/99)*(1-Y%1)+Y%1*F(Y++)),B+=S(b),t%=4,t))X=A/99

For Broken Flows I used this as a starting point and played around with it. My goal was to both explore the variety possible with small changes to the code and to make it look as though it was painted by hand.

To add depth and character I developed a brush stroke system and a color palette picker. It picks the number of colors up to 5, choses a pop color (bright and near full saturation) and builds the rest of the pallet around that. The brush system uses up to 50 smaller lines with slight variations to create a single brush.

There are also many different options that can affect how the piece looks. For example if pastel mode is active the paint is watered down to cause more blending by setting the brush transparency to 10%. Loopy mode causes the angle to accumulate in the flow field which causes interesting spiral patterns. Here’s a piece with both of those enabled.

I also focused on contrast between light and dark areas, often just working in grayscale. The grayscale mode doesn’t just remove saturation but creates a special palette to ensure contrast and pop. I will leave you with one of my favorite grayscales with the triangular field mode causing hard angular strokes, thanks for reading!