Turtle Art: experience the art of computer designing

The computer you are now working with loves to repeat things, change shapes and sizes, connect and separate, and especially copy... Now and then your computer will suddenly stop working and throw something at you that you didn't ask for. But in general, it is a companion which will gladly help you create a world of interesting things.

                         --The Art Of Computer Designing: A Black and White Approach

This paragraph from Osamu Sato's design book best describe the relationship between designers and computer. With computer now, we can efficiently create thousands of strokes and easily get whatever color and shade we want. While is this convenience of producing and copying lower the value of computer designs? After experiencing Turtle Art, a picture creating tool based on blocked codes, however, I got inspired a lot.

Fond of the shell shape in the Turtle Art gallery so much, I decided to first just reproduce the pattern. And I also combine another picture to give the shells an ocean background.

And here it is, the picture I made, with programming language. I think if this pattern is on a plate, or a towel, I would like to buy it.

So to create the ocean-like background, you need to have a big size pen with blueish colors to randomly dot on the canvas. Meanwhile the shade and the size of the pen are both changed according to the place of the dots.To realize that, you need to set the size and the shade of the pen to a variable like ycor + 500 / 8. And to create the bubble-like dots, you just need to make turtle to go forward 1 each time. After repeating 8000 times, the dots would cover the whole canvas.

Now to create the shell, you need to have an oval shape to rotate and get bigger gradually. First you need four arcs with different angles and radius to make the oval shape, and then store the amount of the radius in box. Each time you repeat to create the oval, the box becomes box + 1. After 30 times, you would get a beautiful shell.

Creating art piece with computer, understanding the mechanism and algorithms is important. But what matters the most is still creativity and I really admire those who make this software and those who have created brilliant pictures with it.