Inspiration

I’ve always struggled between the analog and the digital. From the erasure of craftsmanship to mass produced fashion, I feel that society automatically brands analog work as less worthy than digital work. For my self portrait, I wanted to honor the side of me that still clings on to the relatively old fashioned, retro, hand-crafted analog. It’s going against the vague code convention I remember - what is repetitive can usually be condensed into a more efficient form - but as a coding newbie I can ignore it for just this first week.

I was inspired to create a cross-stitch pattern of myself, just like these cute little key accessories.

Process

First, I decided to keep the number of cross stitches relatively small, about 10~20. Keeping the canvas a default size of 400 x 400 pixels, I gave each square that acts as the stitch to 20 x 20 pixels.

I then drew a total of 19 lines vertically and horizontally, each 20 pixels w x h.

• This was a repetitive process. I asked ChatGPT for help to shorten the code for me and got this. Marking it to return after learning loops.

function setup() {
createCanvas(400, 400);
stroke(200);  // Set the stroke color
}

function draw() {
background(220);  // Clear the canvas

// Vertical stitch patterns
for (let x = 20; x <= 380; x += 20) {
line(x, 0, x, 400);
}

// Horizontal stitch patterns
for (let y = 20; y <= 380; y += 20) {
line(0, y, 400, y);
}
}

After I created this off-white grid canvas, I found a cross stitch pattern making site and mapped a preliminary first draft like this:

Try #1

I courageously went to attempt this by mapping out all the rectangles to their coordinates. However, it was such a tedious process that I ended up creating me.. seen a little far from above. It is an incomplete piece.

Try #2