Tools

I'm planning to write a couple of posts this week, describing the three texts that I recently published.

Firstly though, I felt like sharing this little tool I've been building.

Flat Sketch

https://ghostglyph.itch.io/flat-sketch

This is a tiny drawing tool, built with p5.

It started as a way of creating some drawings to overlay on some video I was experimenting with.

I have always liked the particular, scratchy, flat drawing of the basic p5 line. But I've never really completed anything using p5. I've always used small snippets.

There is a really interesting tool community on Itch, and I've been trying to think about ways I can add to that. It's exciting to share these small tools that you might have created in a very specific way for a very specific task as people will probably use them completely differently.

And people do use them. Well a couple do anyway. Itch seems to be at about the right size to float things to peoples attention. It encourages discovery.

I was enjoying using Flat Sketch as a testing ground for different ideas and questions about what p5 can do and how it works. It has developed into a half filled keyboard of brush variables. These can mostly be toggled through a couple of states and all combined and mixed differently.

A while back I was using Processing to run a cellular automata that I was using to create prints. Some of the cellular automata code has now made its way into Flat Sketch as well.

It's funny to share this, here, where to most this will probably look extremely naive and technically terrible. I know it is terrible. I'm still enjoying learning about this side of making things that people use, build and change, rather than things that go out silently into the world. Anyway I'll write more about those next time.