Supermath!

by Lauren Dubuke

 

Yes, that's right, it says Supermath.

It's like superflat. Only with math. You'll see.

 

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This is my art project, and it's based, you guessed it, on the Superflat style created by Takashi Murakami.  Since this was pretty recent, and we spent a decent amount of time on the subject, I'll spare you the gory details.

 

So what exactly does math have to do with Superflat, or anything we've really talked about in this course? Not much, to be honest. And it's a terrible shame. Not to sound like your elementary school math teacher, but math can be fun! Or at least somewhat cool looking. I'll settle for cool looking. (Because even I admit this was a pain!)

 

I can say this project was completely a product of chance, since without 4 particular courses I'm currently taking, it certainly would not have happened. Obviously this class is a pretty big factor in that, so let's mention the significant parts of the other 3:

Calc III - Polar coordinates

Intro to Mathematica (fancy-mathy-computery-thingy) - making spiffy images

Intro to Java, Mathematical Algorithms - RGB color code

 

Confused yet? Good. Let's look at some pretty pictures.

 

Check out a little of the Mathematica code I based this on and demonstrated in class. (Almost all campus computers have Mathematica!)

Mathematica code

 

 

So now you know what's going on, and we can move on to the cool stuff, what I actually made!

 

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My goal here was to somewhat replicate a portion of Takashi Murakami's superflat flowers, but using math equations and RGB color code instead. Yes, it's geeky. And it's pretty darn awesome.

 

Here's the image of Murakami's flowers that I started with:

 

 

And here's what I cropped it down to:

 

 

 

So now I have a place to start. Sort of. My next step was to actually map out the flowers I was going to draw, and start drawing them somehow. And of course, being all mathy about it, I tried pretty hard to keep everything to scale to some degree.

 

My first 6 hours of tracing and drawing yielded this (with about 3 prior hours of math, sketches, scaling, measuring, printing and cutting out sad paper stencils):

 

 

Wait, what's going on here?

Check out the close up!

 

 

So wait a minute, 9 total hours of work, and that's all I have?!?!?!

Yep, this was going to be a loooooong week.

 

 

The next step, or "layer 2" as I called it, was to ink in the circles and the lines seperating the petals.  That one wasn't as bad as the first layer:

 

 

 

 

The next step was to make the smily faces (and more pathetic stencils)!

 

 

And another close-up:

 

 

 

Sheesh, now I can start making it colorful, right?

Almost. first there was another hour of intimate bonding time with a gum eraser to get all the pencil lines out from underneath it all.

These two steps (the circles and petals, and the faces) took around another 7 hours. That's 15+ total hours so far.

 

But it's time for my brand new pack of 24 colorful markers to make a debut!

After over 20 hours of fairly intense work, here is the final product!

 

 

Let's zoom in on the same couple of flowers as last time:

 

 

 

 

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Something I'd like to point out is the similarity between the initial cropped image and my final product. Lets look!