Artist

Puzzle Boxes – A new and unique plastic artform that combines 3D geometry, engineering, and artisan crafting. 

Computer Generated Line Art – Unique computer generated artwork created by the level generator I wrote for my puzzle games.  

Color Grids – Another type of computer generated artwork featured on this site, where my program fills in a grid with colors according to a customizable set of rules.  

Of these projects, my favorite are the Puzzle Boxes, because this project became more about the art than the software.  The other projects solved harder problems, but the end product is mostly computer generated with manual edits. 

Main page: Puzzle Boxes

Puzzle Box Designs

Relativity Box – A 12-piece design consisting of 2 overlapping cubes. I also used an alternate, 20-piece, 2-part design with an optional 8-piece lip.

Sphere Box – A 108-piece design that approximates the shape of a sphere.

Christmas Tree Box – A 120-piece, 3-part Christmas Tree design.

Pyrabox – A 36-piece pyramid shaped design.

Christmas 2022 Decorations Various Christmas themed boxes.

The Process

See: Puzzle Boxes: The Software for a detailed explanation of the process used to create these boxes.

The short version is that I wrote software that takes a 3D model and converts it into a puzzle box design with individual pieces that fit together using finger joints.  The software then creates instructions for a CNC machine that can cut the pieces out from a sheet of material.  

Here is a photo of a set of Christmas Tree Box pieces after they were cut by a CNC laser machine:

For this box, I hand and spray painted the pieces 11 different colors.  Here is a photo of my work in progress: 

Then I assembled them into the following Christmas Tree Box: 

See: Puzzle Boxes for more info and photos.

Gallery

Main page: Computer Generated Line Art

This project evolved from the level generator I wrote for my puzzle games.  When I used my program to create levels larger than those in my games, I found the results so interesting that I focused my development into turning my level generator into an art generator. Most of the resulting images have two layers: one for the lines, and a background similarity shading layer based on Similarity Maps.

See: Computer Generated Line Art for more pictures/details. 

Main page: Color Grids.   

Color grids are another type of computer generated art that I have created. For this work I have written a program that fills in a grid with colors according to a customizable set of rules.  The following example is featured on the page Solving a Hard Problem, with slightly different colors. 

The grid shown has 16 rows and 32 columns with cells three times as tall as they are wide. The colors are evenly distributed in 88 groups of cells, each of which is shown in the gallery below. For example, the first four images show that there are 8 of each color in each of the 16 rows, and 4 of each color in each of the 32 columns.

In addition to the distribution sets, the colors in the grid also adhere to several adjacency restrictions that make the combined rule set one of the hardest that my program solved. See: Color Grids for more details.