Today, Jeremiah Runnels joined us to start work on his part of the project - one which makes extensive use of green screen technology.

On the painting front, a major development occured over the weekend, when the ability to do multi-directional brush strokes was added into the program. The brush stroke can now be at any angle, with any set of random deviations.

To test this out, a new 2 layer portrait of Gramci was attempted with the brush strokes set at 90 degrees (horizontal) and the ability to deviate from this by +/-30 degrees. Added to this, based on the analysis of the efficiency of brush-stroke lengths from the first week of our residency, a maximum brush-stroke of 200 pixels was applied to the image.

Before the portrait was begun, a MIDI controller was used, whilst painting, to quickly adjust the variables in the speed at which brush strokes are projected in order to get the optimum speed. A speed based on the equation below, seems to be the optimum one discovered thus far (x = brush-stroke length in pixels):

Speed (ms) = 1362 x exp(0.002x)

This is clearly an enormous improvement on the previous version of the software. Below, the painting of the second layer can be seen, at one minute intervals (time is in bottom right)