Since all I do these days is post my school projects to my blog, here’s another one for you. This week we had to create a collage. The requirements were pretty bare: at least five instances of the picture, one rotation, one rescaling, and at least one color modification. Try to spot each of the requirements in the final product below. (Maybe you’ve seen the original image before.) I had planned on using longer strips than the squares I ended up implementing, but I got lazy. The checkered effect is a little busy for my tastes; hopefully it’ll make the grade.

I tried for freakin’ ever to get the sky to soft clip to the hill top. I was able to adapt the intermediate image technique described in this article to create a tacky sun (not shown for art’s sake), but not for much more. Instead, I used the built-in, jagged setClip() method native to the java.awt.Graphics2D class. In case you were wondering, the clip was made with about six straight lines. I hate spline fitting, and try never to use curves—especially if line segments will do just fine. File that little tidbit away, it could be useful someday.

But convolutions rock. I’ve always thought so. Ever since I started using them to do signal processing in astronomy class. Our professor made us do a lot of convolutions using a visual calculus that really changed the way I thought about calculation in general. Drawing it out refined my sense of geometric interaction and avoided a lot of messy integrals. Here’s to qualitative methods: hurrah!

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