digital imaging final project — research + process

for the last assignment, we are to create a self portrait in motion graphics.

I wans’t really sure what motion graphics were? i thought it had to be like an animated graphic design but then it turns out this assignment didnt really Require us to do that so! phewhwhw

kind of realising that the Look of a work comes after the concept, so i tried focusing on the aspect of a self-portrait to direct the look of this project.

decided on using plantguy! he is this plant.. thing.. i made?? for my a lvls coursework and he is 2 years old now .

anyway he??it?? functions? as an avatar of sorts because he is a plant..guy..
cant really remember why he’s like so; something about pistachios + walnut shell shape + contentment that goes into his form, and plants bc.. i really like plants hahaha

more specifically like the small bud kinds and wildflower kinds? those are the cutest kinds and plants are always so quiet and unassuming but also they grow slowly and they seem to be the most easily content of all things n so its like! wow! life goals

(basically my dream is to become a plant )

as far as self-portraits go ! i thought of some things that could help represent myself .

ended up sticking to why plantguy was born bc i wanted to portray how my dream self is the animal crossing lifestyle , or like just traveling around in a nice landscape n then coming home . wow just like tabikaeru the travelling frog game!

anyway here is a mood board?? hm

plants!!
- the specific kinds of plants where its earthy and grounded and tiny plants and also bonus points if theres like a river because rivers n plants always look nice

surprise its plant guy but irl!

arietty

animal crossing
- basically my dream i just want to go fishing and chill around all day in a small river town :’)
  - its so hard to find screencaps n i dont have my ds on hand to dig out screenshots n im too lazy to reopen pocket camp so hv these generic screenshots frm google instead 🙁

moomin!!!
- snufkin haha

tabikaeru!!
- (tbh this game came out after plantguy was born so it counts more like a.. o wow!! same hat )

https://78.media.tumblr.com/d8b67484aec378acedaef4429ad41fd5/tumblr_p5842u3oYK1wmmkvwo1_500.png

louie zong

http://louiezong.com/post/166280288119/theres-a-banjo-player-on-my-fire-escape

i really wanted to try the motion tracker function of AE because! it could do the thing that ive always wanted to do for plantguy which is to put him in real life haha

wow i dug this up frm way back 2k16 aaaa its plantguys foetus form

PROCESS

shot a bunch of footage first so id know where to draw in plantguy

Storyboards + 2 column script

initial board ideas. originally i wanted to do a simple animated illustration throughout w/o the motion tracking thing but then aa… time constraints….

(actual storyboard + written 2 column script… ):

painting in photoshop

colour palettes r hard even though ive painted plantguy so many times because this time i had to balance it with the background footage and the colors for that were all over the place aa hopefully i did balance it out enough in the end?? hmmm

included an opening because in my mind the plantguy adventure is episodic and slice of life. (added in a little turbulent displacement for the lines to give it some movementt)

Compositing

i wanted the illustration to stay in one place in the video so i had to learn how to use the motion tracking tool

used the puppet tool to add some slight movement to the animation so that it wouldnt look so stilted.

exported everything to premiere pro to stitch together because after effects can only handle so much 🙁

sound was a scrapped recording of a ukelele that was originally meant for visual storytelling hahaah

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final thoughts:

AE is .. rly tough because there r so many things ?? that being said im really glad that we were able to learn how to use it in this class because its a necessity i gues
if i had more time i would try out something more ambitious because it did feel like a cop out to revisit something i had worked on before, but if anything this project was a technical exercise for me because i rly need to learn how to use… AE….
- (anyway i always use plantguy as a means of exploring new mediums so expect to see him again… next sem… when i have to learn 3d……. aaaaaaaaaa)
n ya it was fun bc it fulfilld /checked off an Art Thing that ive always wanted to try out so!!! :’v
- (is that a tear or an eyebag??? who knos!!)

digital imaging final project .. final??

presenting plantguy
he is a plant..bud
n he goes on adventures to see the world ? sort of

digital imaging assignment 3 – final

“palimpsest”

// a short film about sleeping and dreaming, waking up and the feeling of it.

digital imaging assignment 3 – research! + process

since we are to make a short film about dreams — i thought about sleeping and dreaming, waking up and the feeling of it.

Mood Board

apart from that dali film we were shown during class!

some references that i looked up — this is essentially a mood board/post

1) david lynch ? … he s the only other surreall-y director i know..

i gues the dream sequences in Twin Peaks r really effective because of how Surreal and Displace-y they are?? Lynch is really good at recreating visual sensations that are disjointed from their sounds and I think that’s what makes us feel like we are in a dream when watching too

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A lot of my dreams tend to be set in my home, and from what little I can remember of them , they’re always recognisable places but somehow something’s off?? or there’d be this strong sense of deja vu or something. I don’t really remember much about my dreams but I always feel like a jellyfish in them floating around.

((actually along the way I realised o… actually my film isnt really trying to achieve that surreal spookiness and suspense of Lynch’s films’ ,, rather I’m looking more at the Feeling of Sleeping and Waking, so here are more relevant references??))

2) Vilhelm Hammershøi

I really like how his paintings portray the stillness of interiors — the play of light and how it occupies the interior space — subtly so, the emptiness being so strong??? Even though the painting is about something so mundane, basically just a still life painting of a space there’s this very strong Dreamlike atmosphere– I suppose from the emptiness of space and obscurity of people’s features .

Interior, Sunlight on the Floor (1906)

Like he painted from a physical, habitable space, but somehow the muted palette and turned-away figures transforms that space into something that feels like an echo, made visible. Like some distant memory in one’s mind or sm. haha.

3) Gehard Richter

More specifically his blurred paintings — there’s this v strong sense of wanting to see more , because Richter’s paintings feel like a sustained grasp?? a glimpse?? giving just barely enough to be recognisable, pulling back, denying the viewer the full picture of the image. The paintings themselves really mimic what i think? or at least what i rmb from my dreams — bleariness and blurness and faded memories.

Sailors (1966),150 cm x 200 cm, Oil on canvas

This painting depicts seven men in sailor’s uniforms, facing the viewer. Five of the men are shown standing while two further men are kneeling in front of them. Executed in a monochrome palette, its blurred contours give the painting the appearance of an out-of-focus photograph in which the motif seems to elude the viewer. About this at-the-time characteristic blurring in his paintings Richter asserts: “I blur things to make everything equally important and equally unimportant.”¹

(…)

(x)

Nanny and Kitty (1968), 67 cm x 87 cm, Oil on canvas

Infant on a table (1965), 40 cm x 44 cm, Oil on canvas

Again, there’s the deliberate obscuring of subject matter, which is what I feel make these works feel so dream-like??

Even if it’s in colour and rendered, just only showing the back of the head of a person and not their face– there’s something about being denied this person’s full identity /likeness , coupled with that glow of light around the subject matter, that evokes a dreamlike atmosphere because of how close yet detached from reality this portrait feels.

Betty (1988), 102 cm x 72 cm, Oil on canvas

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and then i realised oh no these r all paintings and not film refs ??? not sure if it is a good or bad thing because in the end it’s about translating ur idea into a video and paintings r still images , not something time-based n this is the first time im doing a video by myself aaa

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Process

Because I wasn’t even sure what sort of footage I’d end up with?? I wanted to see what kind of film I could piece together with whatever footage that I could shoot. But I did try to put together some pre-production things, so that I have some idea / direction of whr i was going w it. :’v

Notes and Storyboards

top down, left page first

Two Column Script

Footage

I ended up with a lot of extra things that I didn’t really need, and so a lot of the time spent in editing was just choosing what clips I wanted to use …. aaa

I actually shot a few things first before realising oh if it’s just blurry interior shots all the way wouldnt it be such a big cop out n boring and impersonal ???? and at the same time i wanted to try to use premiere pro to achieve some old Film / VHS look,, which made me realise!! o. why not use Actual Old VHS Footage and that way it wouldnt just be blurry interior shots of my house. n so i went through some old baby videos that my parents recorded???? n took some bits that I thought I could use.

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Editing

Editing was really hard because I had to go through all the extra things I shot and also decide on which bits to cut . I suppose editing was harder for me bc i didnt really have a Fixed Planned Out Structure for my film? since I was really dependent on what I could possibly end up with on camera . If the cuts in my film don’t match my storyboard / two-column script at all, it’s because a lot of the rearranging was done during editing, and I didn’t document each and every decision made….

that being said! I did spend alot of time trying to make the clips appear over each other with different opacities, to give that superimposed effect. so it could match to the title, “palimpsest”. but it ended up looking really cheesy? and felt really heavy-handed… i wanted to see if i could invoke that same feeling u get when looking at superimposed images fading over each other, without doing so.. ??? that way the audience also has a greater part in the making sense of the moving images.

re: the title!

“palimpsest” means:

palimpsest

ˈpalɪm(p)sɛst/

noun

noun: palimpsest; plural noun: palimpsests

a manuscript or piece of writing material on which later writing has been superimposed on effaced earlier writing.

something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form.

“Sutton Place is a palimpsest of the taste of successive owners”

and so I wanted to achieve this handwritten effect….

except that the words would wiggle after being written out like so:

but i couldnt figure out how to do it in premiere pro?? is it because the write-on effect can only work for fonts not videos?? 🙁

i googled n a lot of After Effects tutorials came out,, so maybe this will hv to wait til I learn AE? for now I had to make do with just either the write-on w/o wiggle, or wiggle w/o write-on.

Colour Grading

(left is before, right is after.)

trying to make sure they sort of matched? since the footage all came from vastly diff lighting sources / recordings, their original colourings were all over the place. hopefully now they’re less all over the place?

Sound and Music

all sounds were from the videos themselves, probably just rearranged here and there. Some were recorded, like the airplane ambient noise and the distorted wave noise at the end.

Music wise! I wanted to make my own music for the film bc i really dont like stock music….. ? its gg to be a generic mess anyway but at least its my own generic mess?????

anyway here is what i was tryna emulate::

i m not a Music person so that is why its only 3?4 chords n a repeated note in cmaj yay.

tbh the tune was made first after shooting , before editing.

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this was a really challenging project for me to do because everything about it is basically what I’ve been trying to avoid to do in ADM aaaaaa

but w/ that being said! i think i did learn a lot about how to use the premiere pro. maybe next time i will learn how to properly use a camera. :’o (I know prof erwin taught us some basic camera things, but i still don’t have the Skills yet 🙁 )

[final film]

digital imaging assignment 02! movie campaign — PROCESS + FINAL

Movie Poster

Here is the poster:

This movie’s title is Goodbye, Gertrude! and it is a 2h jazzy jukebox musical big band bonanza starring ~~Patti LuPone~~ Steaky LaPony as some rich widow or something,, like a maid who won the lottery???? featuring songs from ~~Cole Porter~~ Coleslaw Bellboy ??? ( the name+’s before the movie title is like how u kno all the Rodgers and Hammerstein things always say Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ______ thing…) the bad naming sense is because i wasnt sure if real ppls names were allowed o wel. (((like ngl its ripoff of stuff like this:

(like… hello…->… goodbye… okay okayokay)

anyway!

here are some initial thumbnail sketches:

pink and yellow are happy colours and i want this movie to be a happy movie !

the ones on the left:
- at first i tried putting in the apples just for fun bc like mayb i can try using some photog thing! but then it just felt weird because suitcases fit the Aesthetic Vibes more
- trying to b more dynamic?? w the composition,
the ones with the tiling:
- was trying to go for .. a Magritte’s Golconda kind of thing,, with something of high contrast
- haha these feel the most like a meg cabot novel cover , as in they feel strangely too static to be a movie poster??
middle hat one:
- actually the first one??? i drew
- felt the most like… an “English goodbye at the train aesthetic” where u wave a handkerchief n run after the train or wave out of a train window w ur hand outstretched or something lol ?
  - as in, it fits the title the most??

references used were fancy edwardian hats

Final one without the text over it:

Text and Fonts

Saul Bass was a reference.. ish, in terms of typography? I’m not familiar with typography and graphic design things but I do like how the designs r all so simple-looking but impactful?? and not so cold-looking at the same time.

anyway I found some of the fonts through the magic of google:

other font things! uh those retro poster kinds…

this one was called “the bold font” or something??? i probably downloaded like 10 other diff variants of this sort of font uh

kind of following how the old posters had funky title cards. title font is “Art Post Black”

pls forgive my terrible naming choices!!!!

trying to make the actor credits less distracting??? but i dont know,,, maybe this one is better than the one i printed??? o well….. 🙁

the film credits at the bottom were made using this template. I hope it makes the poster look more legit?? considering how it’s a template of those barely discernible credits u find at the bottom of movie posters a lot:

anyway i spent way too long fiddling with the font ?? hm here are some more refs i used anyway n also yay mood music:

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Composited Images – Different Outlets of Media

Ads in public spaces help reach a larger audience. I suppose if the movie stars a famous person who is on par w patti lupone ???? or like meryl streep or something just their name would be enough to be noticeable for the general public.

but also considering how in my head this is some fancy jazzy movie the esplanade seems like an apt location for the artsy fartsy musical kind of things.

and also those annoying popup youtube ads that i never see because bless adblock.

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here is the poster, all printed out!

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final thoughts

i want to be friends with illustrator but it doesnt seem to want to be friends with me even though i’m only using it for the font
- that being said! the path-text tool was very helpful although i really wish it would obey me more.. 🙁
i should rly decide on a font thing properly before printing!!! like rly hv better font sense because i spetn 3 hrs in regret after printing n oh well
- maybe this is why im no viscommy person but this is school n we r all here to learn things ?
- up till now i stil want to adjust some of the things but i should maybe just let it go ????
photoshopping things is strangely but harder and easier than expected
- wow warp tool! but also, i need to understand shadows n proportions better.
anyway!! this was a fun assignment to do :v

digital imaging assignment 02! movie campaign — RESEARCH

Assignment 2 is here and we’re to make our own movie campaigns for a brand new film! of any genre of our liking and we have to title it and it just sounds really hard o wow.

anyway after deliberating on what genre I would like to do on, i finally decided on something! ish.

[I did thing about a lot of other aesthetics / genres that I could do on, but then I realised I didnt know where to start if I listed so many things. Other top contenders were: ” lana del rey song aesthetic”, “twin peaks / stranger things / small town spooky mystery aesthetic” and “like got a lot of little plants and shrubs and moss growing in a woody forest; fleet foxes aesthetic”. ]

Chosen Film Genre — “that sort of vintage musical comedy thing where they play jazz and big band and its like the earlier half of the 20thc. aesthetic with all their fancy dresses and costumes”

anyway!

Here is a mood board for my project:

things i was searching for include: old (musical) movie posters, toulouse, downton abbey, impressionism paintings, vintage illustrations n cats

I’m still not really sure what a moodboard entails? Hopefully this one conveys the genre and vibe that I’m trying to go for for this imaginary movie I’m making a poster of. I chose happy-feel-good old-timey musical comedies because ! they are always in fancy period costume (at least.. from the lens of this era?) and have such pizzazz and extravagance its so fun. also they hv such interesting posters! Like, you hardly see people taking liberties with illustration for live-action movie posters nowadays,, (correct me if im wrong!!)

I’m aware that the colours aren’t so consistent on this moodboard? But that’s mostly because I’m trying to be more open towards all sorts of colour schemes that I can experiment with later on, rather than being bogged down by some predetermined colour scheme that I can’t let go of.

my inner monologue is 90% this picture. thanks buzzfeed for collating this collection of cats

The main thing I’m going for is still that Hello, Dolly! / Anything Goes kind of thing? of happy big band vibes and big name female leading ladies and like multiple broadway revival runs…Think Throughly Modern Millie except for like the big screen but also like.. without the racism n sexism of the era??????

n so to avoid drawing people badly n poorly or shoot myself in the foot on the poster i m gonna just make the protag have features like all these comics which somehow coincidentally r about cats that r also people

this one is about a cat boyfriend (???)

this one is just a fren (Benji Nate – Catboy)

but like ykno i dont think ill draw a cat-person i think ill try other animals like birds??

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digital imaging: assignment 1 – research + process

The assignment is to create a series of 4-6 images that will evoke the 6 basic emotions:

happiness
sadness
fear
anger
surprise
disgust

initially i made a little mindmap to kind of get a sense of what (i feel) represents these emotions. Because feelings are such nebulous blobby things that you can’t really put a finger on, and anyway isn’t like a good percentage of artmaking an outlet for ur Feelings??

I wasn’t sure what the unifying thing to tie the images together would be, so i just settled on .. trying to play around w the diff ways you can stick to one colour to depict different emotions (automatically i thought of Red, but that’s because i wanted to use pastel pink at one point and also how it seemed like the most visceral hue–it can be angry, of the body, shocking, happy, etc).

((another reason was because.. the first thing i thought of when i saw the assignment brief was Pixar’s Inside Out, but sticking to that already developed colour palette felt like a cop-out…)))

I decided on digital painting / illustration because that’s what I’m more comfortable with, although I did initially wanted to incorporate some photographed elements ?? it just didnt work out. :/

anyway initial thumbnails.

1. Happiness

I think this emotion comes rather easily for me because I spend a lot of time thinking about what makes me happy?? if that makes sense. I thought about a really happy memory and also. Living in a little village in a nice temperate country is my dream in all honesty lol.

(little fishing village called marken! in amsterdam i wanna go back :’)

Some references i used were:

the backgrounds from Steven Universe: use of pastels and lighting –> gives great sense of tranquility n beauty

Also: these works from Chinese illustrator Oamul’s “Iceland” series. I really enjoy the texture .. it gives such a warm and homely feel ☺️ (http://www.oamul.com/iceland/)

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At first I just eyedropped colours to get a sense of how they use the values to construct the image… but it bordered dangerously towards just blatant copying?? and thats not cool so i tried to change the colours while still maintaining a pastel-y vibe.

color schemes r actually hard for me so i picked them from the russian roulette mv because iv always wanted to paint something with those colours

adding in details n little squiggles

The brushes I used were the wet charcoal , palette knife3 n wet pencil brush from kyles brushes in photoshop! ((thanks to the powers of adobe u can get them for free here legally yay)) im still trying to figure out how to paint in photoshop, or just painting in general, n i really like how these brushes could still give a very organic/traditional textural effect to an otherwise cold n digital medium.

Final:

((because this is a digital imaging class I thought it would b nice to add in things that a printed medium wouldnt b able to do. Not sure if it’s obvious but I just had this screen layer change opacity slightly over time, abit to mimic how sunlight sort of does the Thing. It feels a bit redundant here though, bc theres so much more that I could do to make this effect way more convincing :/ ))

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2. Sadness

Sadness is hard to grasp because it’s such a void and just really sad to think about. But with that in mind… a void?? The only thing I could think of was a hole in ones chest because thats what sad feels like sometimes, or that when u feel suffocated and all that:

in all honesty im not really someone who draws sad things so this was quite difficult for me!!! this shoegaze album is the most emo thing i could think of, and i guess the visual resemblance between their album art n my work is evident :/

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I stuck to a more contrasting colour palette for this one, because red n black r such Angsty™ colours.

Started off w the background: it’s just 3 frames on a loop.

final one is like 15 frames. its my first time trying to animate a proper blob haha.

I’m still not sure whether coloured in blobs or not are better, but i stuck w the coloured on because it feels more complete?? like it looks closer to something that I can submit for an assignment rather than just a sketch :///

Final:

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3. Fear

My initial take on fear was all anxiety and nervousness, like when i have to go downstairs at hall to the canteen to buy food n there r so many ppl where u know but dont kno?????? so u hv to stand around awkwardly surrounded by all of them as u buy food and they r all so loud and intimidating . but this idea never really felt right (??) bc i was always bogged down by the composition.

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It was easier to think about Aesthetics instead, and Emily Carroll has always been one of my favourite comic artists. She does horror comics, and the cover of her book was actually the thing that lead me to think about using the colour red as a semi-cohesive thing to tie the images together. haha.

Here are some of her works I really like:

Margot’s Room (2011)

http://emcarroll.com/comics/margot/index.html

Out of Skin (2013)

http://www.emcarroll.com/comics/skin/

His Face All Red (2010)

http://emcarroll.com/comics/faceallred/01.html

(the thing i really like abt her style is that its just a distinct…. indie horror vibe?? of haunted woods and small town murders a la twin peaks style but more folksy. )

Also: Masaaki Yuasa’s Devilman Crybaby was the scariest thing I watched recently ?? I took some screencaps for reference of how he portrayed fear (not sure if i actually used it in the end but.. hm. i suppose it did help to reinforce how important texture is to a work??? like it helps give a greater impact and defining quality blah blah):

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((actually! this illustration was he first one I tackled. I really wanted to try out Em Carroll’s style, so I thought it would be good to base n try to unify my 4 images w how the style ended up))

the initial sketch

Final:

View post on imgur.com

Added in motion blur haha like the thing we did in class??? Im still on the fence on whether it makes it look cheesy,????? i also still havent figured out how to upload proper quality gifs to oss yet. 🙁

the last frame is supposed to hold for a few seconds but i guess for compression’s sake it got shortened. :(((

but really if cannot im happy w this still jpg

4. Anger

Anger was about as difficult as sadness but maybe even more so??? it’s hard for me to think about it w/o an associated aesthetic to it…. 🙁 I thought about how i was annoyed at myself for being unable to think n then i realised that was getting meta lol

like artist s block

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things I associate w anger are things like fire and burning things?

haha this is frm adventure time

it feels like a very straightforward emotion… and anyway whatever i draw inevitably ends up in some weird messy style, so i thought about utilising that to convey this emotion??

I was thinking about trying to improve and actually do some digital Painting. actually this was the last one I did, and i felt that so far I hadn’t really done Painting Painting… especially for the Sadness one. :/ ??? n so hello pinterest my ol friend which lead me to this:

Marc Peyronen — Colour Mood paintings

References from Devilman again, because it was convenient and I do really admire the style!!

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anwyay during this assignmnt i discovered how to use artboards!! which were super useful!!! im nvr going back on my 1000 chrome tabs opened for references while drawing ever again, probably

after adjusting the hues and color balance a little.

Final:

(jpg vers)

(gif vers)

i feel like these sorts of little animation things are so much easier to do in something that isnt photoshop. bc im only familiar w the frame animation function of PS, not the other timeline option…. mayb that wouldv saved time???? especially i think it can toggle layer by layer, vs having to redo frm scratch if u want to add something

i really need to figure out how to upload a proper good quality gif that isnt 600px… mayb ill put up a dropbox or sth for the proper files!!

((!!!!!!im sorry prof erwin for the potentially large file sizes ?))

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Final thoughts:

painting is hard and painting in photoshop is harder
I wish i couldv been able to utilise some photography things, but i didnt really have the time to figure out how??
- more so it was like i prefer painting / illustration mostly bc it’s easier to express and get ur ideas out.. rather than.. finding things.. to photograph :'(
- also conveniency’s sake bc i live in pulau ntu for 70% of the week
I’m not sure if im truly satisfied w how my final images turned out because!!! i couldv had better originality w some of them and probably a stronger overarching theme ..
good things :
- more familiar with PS painting ??i guess its rly just practice and getting familiar w diff tools.
- it was v fun to do even tho my process can sometimes be very slow ??

[final] [dropbox link for full images]