TS

Artem Verkhovskiy x Andy Shaw Releasing on July 11, 1pm CT artblocks.io

Giving birth to...

Total Strangers

The humble doodle...

[Artem] - I spend a lot of time writing code, both for generative art and working on my masters thesis which is around application of ML algorithms in the field of architecture.

When I’m deep in a coding session, if I feel my head is not working I'll take a pen and make some semiconscious sketches. It's a way to help my brain to reset, to give it a rest before I wade back into a particular challenge I've been battling against.

[Andy] - I enjoy sketching people IRL. Often i’ll head to our local library and sketch people reading their books or studying. It's a public space, so you get such a mix of folk there. Young and old, sleepy or chatty, bulbous noses, furrowed brows and cleft chins.

Through the act of sketching them, you end up absorbing all these unique characters into your mind’s eye, almost like it's via osmosis. Later, when creating imaginative doodles, some feature or quirk that I'd seen would float to the surface.

[Andy] - I love creating blind contour drawings. That’s where you’re not looking at the paper, just at the subject, capturing the features of someone with a single continuous line. Usually the strokes have a lot of flow, and nuance in terms of thicks and thins. Artem and I both decided it could be a fun path to explore. There was a lot of back and forth initially about how we could accomplish something in that vein within the boundaries / contraints of the Art Blocks platform.

The idea

Early exploratory sketch

Animation

[Artem] - As in our previous projects, one of the key aspects that we wanted to bring to the project from the beginning was animation. Animation allows an additional level of information transmitted from the work to the viewer and adds another dimension - the dimension of time, which can be used as one more tool. In this work, we used time to convey the feeling of creating a drawing with a live hand in front of the viewer.

[Andy] - I’ve found people LOVE to watch you draw. There’s something magical, hypnotic about seeing a line trace along the page, seeing a creation emerge. We wanted to capture that energy!

[Artem] - Yes, plus we wanted it to feel natural. Unlike a plotter, which knows in advance all the necessary movements to complete a drawing, it is common for a living artist to speed up and slow down the movement of their drawing tool and spend a split of a second thinking about subsequent actions. We conveyed this phenomenon with the help of easing functions that alters the speed of the stroke during the drawing process.

Process

[Artem] - To create the components for each face, we needed a convenient tool for converting drawn elements into code. Initially, we tried to create a completely standalone tool for creating elements using splines with controllable point weights, however, we found that splines are less convenient to manage than bezier curves, and we decided to base on the SVG format for further work.

[Andy] - Yeah, that initial drawing tool that Artem created was great in the sense that all the elements were created in-browser rather than jumping back and forth between different programs, but it didn't quite have enough freedom for creation of longer sweeping curves.

[Artem] - We changed to creating drawings using the SVG format. It does not contain the weight [thickness] for each point of the curve, which was necessary in our case, so we changed the SVG format so that it could have this additional information.

[Andy] - So for every point plotted along a shape, we manually assigned its thickness

Library sketch, mixed media

Challenges along the way

[Artem] - The biggest issue was when my boiler broke down and I used only cold water for a couple of days!

[Andy] - For me it was the sheer quantity of drawings that had to be created. For every feature, there were 3 or 4 that didn’t make the cut.

[Artem] - There was a very long period of refining and culling as well, especially honing the drawing tools.

Drawing mediums

[Artem] - To create a set of tools that our algorithm uses when drawing Total Strangers, we used many parameters that are familiar to Photoshop users: a brush ‘stamp’ as an image, color, opacity, angle and size jitter, scatter, spacing, etc.

For some tools, such as the pen and pencil, we have reduced the possible difference between the thickness of the lines to convey the feel of the real medium.

Unexplored directions

[Andy] - Each stranger is generated a name upon minting, viewable in the features. At one stage we had the idea of allowing the project to name itself. Perhaps the title could match the name generated in mint #0? I liked the idea of having a project title like “Stephen - by Artem Verkhovskiy and Andy Shaw”. I was just thinking about the discussions in Block Talk about “sweeping Stephen” and “when is Stephen going to be released?” However it soon became apparent it would be super confusing haha.

Accessory development

Last thoughts

[Artem] - While I was working on the code, it was a lot of fun to notice the similarities of some strangers with familiar people (family members, friends, celebrities) and sometimes come up with who this or that character could be.

It's probably not that noticeable, but each piece of paper under the strangers is unique in its texture and subtle tint. We wanted it to be delicate enough not to draw too much attention and remain an inconspicuous background for the main part of the work. We also made it possible to make the background transparent by pressing [B] and saving the image as a PNG, for when you’d like to layer the image up.

[Andy] - This is the third project that Artem and I have worked on together. The final outputs might feel free n’ easy, but under the hood, Total Strangers was our most challenging project to date. I feel really proud of our collaboration.

Total Stranger #0

Journal break

Early brush explorations