When the theme of fall was announced my mind instantly went to pumpkins. However, I wanted to go in a direction that would blend my love for both computer science and art history. Thus for this first project, I took inspiration from artist Yayoi Kusama's iconic pumpkin sculptures.
My code draws a new pumpkin every three seconds randomly picking from four Kusama inspired colors: orange, red, blue, and green. I tried to match the colors to the ones used in the recent Kusama and Louis Vuitton collaboration. All pumpkins have the same black dots.
The creation of the pumpkin was a lot of trial and error. I began by coding three filled ellipses. At first they were too close together creating a shape that was more similar to a lemon, rather than a pumpkin. Once I was content with the general pumpkin shape, I moved on to coding the stem. This was created by using two filled rounded rectangles. I played around with their widths, heights, and the degree of roundness on the corners until I achieved the desired effect. After meeting with Professor Tseng, I chose to put a black outline on the center ellipse. I believe that this made the pumpkin shape more clear.
Lastly, I added the dots. I found this task to be the most daunting. The dots get smaller the further they are from the center, which gives a bit of dimensionality to the pumpkin. Placement and dot size was a lot of trial and error. It involved many micro (1 pixel) adjustments.
To change the color of the pumpkin, I just redraw the design every three seconds and set the fill of the ellipses to a randomly assigned color in the color array. Picking colors was a bit of a challenge as the color format in Arduino was not the standard six character hex value. I tried to match the dots on the envelope as closely to the colors of the pumpkin. In person the colors are almost identical.