bad artists copy (and make animated gifs in imagemagick)

This morning I made the animation you see to the right - actually there's a mildly interactive p5.js app badartistscopy.

It might seem mildly interesting, but ultimately is far less cool than the inspiration, Line Girl, by Low Sugar Eye Candy who seems to have a lot of experience playing with "Girl with the Pearl Earring"

I haven't done much image processing in Processing or P5 - in p5, it is hella slow... watching it loop through and grab each pixel from the image felt like watching a BASIC program on a Commodore 64. I ended up having to take have a variable and just sample every "X" pixels.

I snagged an in-progress version and called it a prototype and it hints at how it's all done - I go through and take an RGB sample, and then average it to get a gray tone. Each particle then looks at the gray value closest to under it, and then one next to, and the bigger the contrast, the "slower" it goes (by adding less to its x position)

I don't think the original Line Girl is doing that much different - just some better choices with how particles are connected, and then tweaking some values (along with better raw source material)

I was surprised at how easily it loops - a ten frame animated GIF captures it. I recorded ten frames from the middle of the animation. At first I used the EZGif site, but I could have just used ImageMagick: convert -loop 0 *png run.gif