Sketches in Processing

Processing is where I learned to draw with code. The archive keeps two runs of my own sketches: small ones from February to May 2011, and geometry for the 3D printer from March 2017. Almost none of it was saved as pictures at the time, so most of the images here are the original code, run again in November 2026.

2011: first sketches

The first files are exercises from February 2011: a sine wave drawn in points that grows taller with every click, and a line pulled from the middle of the window to the mouse.

Falling Frame

A bar drops from the top of the window and speeds up as it falls, as if under gravity, turning a degree with every frame. Its grey steps from white to black and back. When it reaches the bottom it starts again from a random point along the top. The window is never cleared, so every fall stays on the screen as a twisting ribbon. I exported it as a web applet in April 2011.

One fall: a single grey ribbon twisting down the window.

A thinner version from 21 February 2011 shrinks the bars as they fall, so the ribbons turn into lines, like a barcode.

Thin falls: a few grey lines down a white window.

Thin falls after many drops, a dense field of vertical lines.

Spin

A grid of 51 by 51 squares, shading from blue along the centre lines to green in the corners, from 19 February 2011. On top of it a translucent ellipse turns around the centre a degree at a time, growing longer each frame and shifting between green and blue.

The grid alone: blue cross through the middle, green corners.

The ellipse after one turn, a small pinwheel at the centre.

After a thousand frames, green blades reaching out from the centre.

After three thousand frames, the blades softened into rays.

2012: sound

In August 2012 I worked through a set of sketches on sound-responsive visuals, built on Marius Watz’s Modelbuilder library. Music is broken into frequencies, and the frequencies drive the shapes. These two are screenshots I kept, from the course’s example code.

A long spun form of coloured rings, built from the frequencies of a song.

Overlapping rings in blue, orange, yellow and white, drawn to music, 27 August 2012.

2017: surfaces to print

In March 2017 Processing came back as a way to make things for the resin printer. Using the hemesh library, the sketches built the Voronoi vessels in Light in Resin, and Dini’s surface, a spiral like a twisted horn. Between 18 and 24 March the Dini sketch was run again and again, bending and twisting the surface and saving each one as a mesh. These are renders of five of them.

Dini's surface as a white twisted horn, two turns.

A tighter version, the horn flaring at the top.