Art and creativity
These entries show off my more creative side: my illustrations, my cross-stitch, my fiction.
Sub-topics:
Recreating the bird animation from Swift.org
The Swift.org website got a redesign, including an animation of a swooping bird, and I read the source code to understand how it works.
Always running
When the fire starts, I am already running for the exit. I run because somebody must show the way.
Doodling with the Mac’s command icon
Rotating a looped hook around a central point creates a surprising variety of shapes.
Drawing repetitive radial artworks
Using polar coordinates to draw leaf- and flower-like patterns that repeat in circles around a point.
Making a PDF that’s larger than Germany
We’re gonna need a bigger printer.
Hyperfocus and hobbies
The power of ADHD-associated hyperfocus and how I’ve become wary of feeding it too often.
A blue plaque for Hester
Making a small memorial to a forgotten secretary who helped pull off one of the most daring deceptions of WWII.
Cats, cross-stitch, and copyright
In celebration of my favourite apex predator.
The maths cross-stitch that hangs behind me
When I’m on video calls, my backdrop has some maths-related art that I helped to make.
Generating art from lattice graphs
Randomly selecting a subset of edge from a graph can make pretty pictures.
Drawing inner/outer strokes in SVG (clips and masks)
Showing how clips and masks work, and how they can be used to draw inner and outer strokes of a shape.
Illustrating lifecycle transitions in Amazon S3
A picture speaks a thousand words, which is why I always have pen and paper to hand.
25 articles
Using perceptual distance to create better headers
I started picking colours for my site headers with a more perceptually uniform approach, so their colours look more correct to the human eye.
Drawing Truchet tiles in SVG
Using parametric templates to draw Truchet tiles, then placing them randomly to create generative patterns.
Slipstitch, Queer Craft, and community spaces
Remembering Slipstitch, a queer-friendly yarn shop and the fortnightly crafting meet-ups that were a highlight of my week.
Creating static map images with OpenStreetMap, Web Mercator, and Pillow
I made some simple map visualisations by downloading tiles from OpenStreetMap, then annotating the tiles with Pillow.
Two examples of hover styles on images
When I hover over an image, I can add a border to a link, or change the colours of an SVG icon.
The Collected Works of Ian Flemingo
A fledgling author uses a theatre trip to leave the nest. (Or: some props I made for a cosplay event.)
s3tree: viewing a tree of objects in S3 in my terminal
A script to give me a quick overview of some objects in a hierarchical view.
Some experiments with circle-based art
Casually covering a canvas with coloured circles.
An Egyptian ‘mixtape’ of embroidered material
Repeating geometric patterns make for a colourful and eye-catching piece.
Drawing a circular arc in an SVG
A Python function to help me draw circular arcs, as part of an upcoming project.
One small stitch for yarn, one giant leap for yarn-kind
I made a cross-stitch blueprint of the Apollo Moon lander and the Saturn V rocket.
Illustrating the cipher wheels of a Lorenz machine
Some old code I wrote to draw cam-accurate illustrations of cipher wheels.
Creating animated GIFs from fruit and veg
Some Python code for turning MRI scans of fruit and veg into animated GIFs.
Creating coloured bookshelf graphics in Rust
Explaining some code that draws coloured rectangles in a way that looks a bit like an upside-down bookshelf.
The Oboe of Optozorax, and Other Objects
A collection of small worldbuilding ideas about magical objects.
Creating striped flag wallpapers with Pillow
Generating pride-themed Norse valknuts with Python 🌈
A web app to generate mashups of Norse valknuts and Pride flags.
Drawing with triangular coordinates in SVG
Some code and trigonometry for drawing shapes that don’t fit neatly into a rectangular grid.
Peering through MRI scans of fruit and veg
What do you see when you pass fruit and vegetables through an MRI scanner? And how many animated GIFs can you make?
Signs of the time
A few lessons I learned while doing the signage for this year’s PyCon UK.
Making the venue maps for PyCon UK
A quick braindump of my thoughts from drawing some venue maps for PyCon UK.
Drawing ASCII bar charts
A Python snippets for drawing bar charts in command-line applications.
Creating low contrast wallpapers with Pillow
Take a regular tiling of the plane, apply a random colouring, and voila: a unique wallpaper, courtesy of the Python Imaging Library.
Tiling the plane with Pillow
Using the Python Imaging Library to draw regular tilings of squares, triangles and hexagons.
Cloning GitHub’s Contributions chart
I made a clone of GitHub’s Contributions graph to use as a motivational tool.
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Drawing an image with Liquid Glass using SwiftUI Previews
I used Xcode to create an image with a Liquid Glass effect, then I used the Preview to export it as a standalone file.
Group nodes in a Mermaid flowchart by putting them in a subgraph
Combine arrows in Mermaid by using an invisible node
How to embed an inline SVG in a CSS rule
Modern browsers allow you to embed the SVG almost as-is, with just a couple of characters that need escaping – no base64 required!
Pausing the animation of <svg> elements can affect child <svg> elements differently in different browsers
SVGs are only rendered on GitHub if you use an
<img>that points to another fileAnimate an attribute of an element with <animate>