Tactile Loops and Digital Play | July 23, 2025
This Week’s Highlight
In this week’s tutorial, I show how to create real-time mirrored distortions using basic transformation functions. Instead of clean symmetry, I leaned into chaos: ripples, warps, and weird reflections. It’s beginner-friendly, perfect for exploring visual manipulation without going too deep (yet 🤓).
What Inspires Me
This week’s sketch was inspired by TraceLoops (aka Matthias Brown), an artist who uses hand-cut shapes and simple, frame-by-frame animation to create looping visuals. The work feels raw and physical. You can tell it was made by hand, not just on a screen.
That hand-crafted feel is a good reminder that not everything needs to be precise or polished. It’s a helpful contrast to the fast, clean feel of generative work and pushes me to think differently about movement and texture.
Sketches, Not Masterpieces
This week’s sketch began as a quick experiment with image scaling—something I hadn’t really explored before. I threw in some mirror effects just for fun, and it turned into something surprisingly playful.
That’s something we remind ourselves often in SPARK: not everything needs to be polished to be worth making.
I came across a tweet from Zach Lieberman that really resonated:
What idea are you saying hello to this week?
Until next week!
Patt