Assignment 3: Apa itu Buah Kawung? (What is Buah Kawung?)

Concept

Batik is an Indonesian pattern. Batik-making is a traditional art that uses wax to create Batik patterns on a fabric. I wanted to recreate a Batik pattern for this assignment. The main pattern that serves as my inspiration is the Batik Kawung pattern, which I incorporated into my work as the background.

Initially I didn’t know what Kawung meant, but after researching, Kawung is a fruit (Sugar Palm fruit) and this fruit is the inspiration behind the Batik Pattern. I also incorporated this fruit into my piece as the inspiration behind the floating yellow flowers that appear when the mouse is clicked anywhere on the canvas.

My next inspiration came from the use of floral designs in many Batik textiles, so I went onto Pinterest to look for a specific color scheme as well as flower designs. I love the look of a soft color palette, especially pinks and greens, so I went with this specific Pin as my main inspiration for the objects in my work.

 Highllight

My favorite part of the code has to be the functions I made for the main central flower. I learnt how to use the rotate function to create the petals of the flower, and I’m proud of myself for figuring out how to create the line details on the petals (with increasing and decreasing lengths) using for() loops because it took me quite a while to get it right since I kept messing up the angle of rotation between each repetition. I challenged myself further by making a spin() function in my Flower() class so that whenever the mouse touches the flower, the flower will start spinning.

show() {
  angleMode(DEGREES);
  translate(200, 200);
  rotate(this.angleSpeed);

  // outer flower
  stroke("rgb(245,235,216)");
  fill("#65180b");
  for (this.petal = 0; this.petal <= 7; this.petal += 1) {
    ellipse(0, 50, 60, 80);
    rotate(45);
  }

  // line detail
  for (this.petal = 0; this.petal <= 7; this.petal += 1) {
    for (this.i = 0; this.i <= 10; this.i += 5) {
      line(0, 0, 0, 60 - this.i);
      rotate(7.5);
    }

    for (this.i = 0; this.i <= 10; this.i += 5) {
      line(0, 0, 0, 45 + this.i);
      rotate(7.5);
    }
  }

  // inner flower
  stroke("#65180B");
  fill("#df8d7b");
  for (this.petal = 0; this.petal <= 7; this.petal += 1) {
    rotate(45);
    ellipse(0, 20, 30, 40);
  }
}

spin(){
  // spin flower
  this.angleSpeed += 2
}

 

Sketch

Hover over the central flower to see it spin and click on any part of the canvas to add more designs onto the piece!

Reflection

In this project I got to learn more about the history of Batik patterns as well as the origins behind them. In terms of technicalities, I see the appeal of using Objects; it made this project so much neater and more organized than my previous ones. Incorporating my culture into making this project is something I would definitely think about for future projects.