A closer look at: Coil
Created on: 4th October 2005
The first of my pieces of art I'm actually going to try and explain, both in mathematical terms, and appearance. This is mainly for myself, but to show Patty that it actually is EA, in case he still doesn't believe me ;)
My aim with this piece was to duplicate Patty's Delicate Coil (which he will maybe get around to re-posting on dA when he gets over his yellow fetish). He said that this could not be done in EA, requiring imperative code to draw. However, I did manage to work out the equation for a general coil, and a surprisingly simple one at that.
r = tan(theta+rad) (adding suitable definitions for theta = 90 and 270 degrees, of course)
With minor alterations such as adding constant multipliers to each term, the shape made in the picture was drawn. It was all red, as the equation was defining the r variable.
But this was not good enough for me. I wanted pretty colour.
So I altered my code to contain two parts. One was the form of the coil, white on black, with a similar equation to that given above. The second was a normal colour deviation. By defining a suitable step function, I was able to super-impose the coil on top of the colour, if you will. If this pixel is within the limits of the coil, colour it according to the colour formulae, else leave it black.
Note to Patty: The black at the sides of the coil has to do with the colours of the coil, not the coil itself. When I made the original red version, it was all red, as this version is all colour as well. None of this black.
And the result of all this tinkering is what you see above. It's the first piece I've actually crafted from scratch, this is what I want it to look like, and following steps to achieve my goal. Hope you like it :)