ike blue

@ike

I’m an earnest, curious, weirdo. Blue is my favorite color, and a hobby. I always want to learn more. Materials Science and Engineering background. Somerville, MA cis white man, quite lefty signal: ike_blue.50 @ike@mastodon.xyz

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ike blue@ike· 23d

57th #daily, coming in late: an assortment of blue hexagonal epoxy casting tinkerings. I’m struggling with feeling like I have creative control trying to make art in off-shelf-molds, but in some sense it should be like making any other art. More tinkering needed.

A photo of a small pile of blue hexagonal cast epoxy objects. Two boxes, three lids, a bowl, a tray, and several small tiles, some holographic surfaces. The epoxy pieces are variously colored with inks, mica powders, and some glow powders. ike blue 2026

ike blue@ike· 24d

56th #daily #blue #hexagonal #art. More work from scratch in #inkscape. Call this a sketch or work in progress, I want to refine this and take it further. For this one, I imagined I was making a Bob Ross-style painting. Yes, I do listen to Boards of Canada sometimes.

A computer drawing. Blue hexagons are arranged with the intent to make a pastoral mountain scene, with chunky snow-capped mountains in the background, a few clouds in the sky, a turquoise hexagon sun, an irregular blue hexagon lake, a little hexagon cabin with some smoke rising from the chimney, and some happy little trees made of overlapping hexagons. ike blue 2026

ike blue@ike· 25d

55th #daily #blue #hexagonal #art. I was going to do another variation on the recent animations, but I felt the need to start from scratch today. It's a vector drawing in #inkscape using only solid hexagons, with no outlines, gradients, or blurs. I was thinking about blueberries while I made it.

A computer drawing. On a very dark blue background, there are many hexagons of different sizes in an arrangement with three-fold rotational symmetry. Some of the hexagons have their long diagonal oriented horizontally, and smaller number of the hexagons have their long diagonal oriented vertically. The hexagons are mostly aligned with each other by coincident vertices. ike blue 2026

ike blue@ike· 26d

54th #daily #blue #hexagonal #art. ...and here's another variation! Today I wanted to get contrast-y and make things pop with some orange. The fun bouncing motion is largely accidental.

ike blue@ike· 27d

53rd #daily #blue #hexagonal #art. I think there are a bunch more fun variations I can do with small changes to my existing code, but I'll need more tricks eventually. #processing #creativecoding

ike blue@ike· 28d

52nd #daily #blue #hexagonal #art, and I'm caught up now! This one is a, um, study, with ultramarine pigment and "Medium Adam 25", the two components of Yves Klein Blue. I think I'll need to practice both the mixing and the application to get the like-dry-pigment saturation and brightness.

A photograph of a painting on a square panel, 8 inches by 8 inches.
The painting shows an intensely dark blue hexagon, with a few lighter patches, a rough, uneven surface texture, and some patches with strangely reddish overtones. A more intense brighter blue, dried from a diluted wash of the paint, to a very thin layer. The pigment is unevenly distributed as it flowed an settled in tiny evaporating puddles. ike blue 2026

ike blue@ike· 28d

51st #daily #blue #hexagonal #art, still a day behind with this one. This one is more intentional, but with an awful kludge in the code to get around a problem I haven't figured out yet. More fun with counter-rotation. #processing #creativecoding

ike blue@ike· 29d

50th #daily #blue #hexagonal #art. So, I'm a day behind now, hopefully catching up soon. This one is a mix of doing stuff intentionally and unintentionally again. (I can produce unreliable results just like an LLM, but without the vibe coding!).

ike blue@ike· Jul 10

49th #daily #blue #hexagon #art. I wanted to do something simpler today, so I went back to concentric hexagons, and got interested in the idea of them counter-rotating. With a little wobble. This feels like I'm part-way towards a more compelling idea. #creativecoding #processing

ike blue@ike· Jul 10

48th #daily. Yesterday I was trying to get the hexagons to sort of wiggle in place in little circles, but my first go at it had them wiggling in very large circles. Today I got the wiggling down and played with some different coloring styles. It might be too much at once, I may keep iterating.

ike blue@ike· Jul 9

47th #daily #blue #hexagonal #art. I wanted to see if I could do a quick variation on Day 46's code to do something with translation instead of rotation/scale... and the first time I ran it, I got this! This is not at all what I expected or was going for, but it's too good not to share. #Processing

ike blue@ike· Jul 9

One last Day 46 (or is it?): The first frame of the animation, but at a decent resolution.

A computer-generated image. On a light blue background, there are a lot of blue hexagons of different shades of blue and different sizes. The centers of the hexagons are regularly spaced in a hexagonal pattern. The hexagons are largest and bluest at the top center of the image, overlapping each other and showing their transparency. Towards the bottom of the image, the hexagons are much smaller, do not overlap, and are colored more lightly blue. The sizes of the hexagons are derived from the distances of the hexagons from the center, and the colors are derived from the angular position of the hexagons around the center. ike blue 2026

ike blue@ike· Jul 8

Day 46 again, There was a little bug in the code that was bothering me, and I eventually found it and fixed it (and made a few other tweaks). The difference is small, but noticeable.

ike blue@ike· Jul 7

46th #daily #blue #hexagonal #art. More #Processing #creativecoding animation today. There's a lot of different things one can do with hexagons (and shades of the color blue), and I'm having fun doing some of them!

ike blue@ike· Jul 7

45th #daily #blue #hexagonal art. I'm preoccupied with the Processing animations, but today, it's another hue-rotated food 🍉 hexagon.

A photograph of a chunk of watermelon on a green cutting board, but the hues of the picture have been rotated so that the watermelon is a deep blue and the cutting board is a vibrant pink/magenta. The watermelon chunk was cut into the shape of a hexagonal pyramid, and in the photo, it's lying on one of its triangular faces so that the hexagonal base faces the camera. ike blue 2026

ike blue@ike· Jul 5

44th #daily #blue #hexagonal art. Early post today, as I couldn't wait to play around with the code some more to make it do different things. I'm trying to be clever with the expansion/contraction and it's kind of working how I want, but it's still a bit wonky. #processing #creativecoding

ike blue@ike· Jul 5

43rd #daily #blue #hexagonal art. My work on my #processing code is already paying off! #creativecoding

ike blue@ike· Jul 4

I made my 14th platelets donation of 2026, yesterday. They gave me a special pair of socks for donating at least 12 times this year… the socks are not much of an incentive for me, and they’re not really blue enough for my style, but I still feel a little pleased/proud by them.

A photograph of a pair of socks. The socks have a variety of colors and patterns on them in a sort of patchwork fashion, including Red Cross branding, the text “Platelet Donor”, triangles, squares, stripes, a red heart in a light blue circle, and a yellow teardrop shape on a navy blue background, and more. The yellow teardrop shape symbolizes the yellow color of concentrated platelet fluid.

ike blue@ike· Jul 4

42nd #daily #blue #hexagonal art. I got my #processing code doing what I want for now, and I think it should be a good basis for expressing a lot more ideas. #creativecoding

ike blue@ike· Jul 3

41st #daily #blue #hexagon art. I've made some progress on my Processing code, but I've got a ways to go before it's doing what I want.

A computer drawing. On a gray background, there are a lot of overlapping hexagons in different partially-transparent shades of blue, and some white hexagons in the lower right corner. ike blue 2026

ike blue@ike· Jul 2

40th #daily #blue #hexagonal art. I've been working on retooling my Processing code, but I don't think I can get it working well enough to make a piece with it tonight, so here's another overlapping-grids piece in #Inkscape.

A computer drawing. On a blue background with a subtle gradient, 6 regular hexagonal grids are stacked. From the bottom to the top of the stack, the colors go from a dark blue to a light blue, the thickness of the lines of the grids get thinner, and the scale of the grid gets larger. All of the grids share a common vertex at the upper left corner of the image, but the grids diverge as they get farther away from that corner due to the scaling. The image mostly looks 2D, but between the gradients, the different shades of blue, and the scaling changes, it looks like the image has a little bit of depth. ike blue 2026

ike blue@ike· Jul 1

39th #daily #blue #hexagonal art. I figured out a different way to play with hexagonal grids in #Inkscape.

A computer drawing. 4 overlapping grids of regular hexagons of the same size as each other. The grids have different line thicknesses. One of the grids is directly on top of another one; those two grids are shades of blue. The other two grids have gradient colors, going from orange to blue in one grid and blue to violet on another grid. Some of the line colors and fill colors in the image are partially transparent. ike blue 2026

ike blue@ike· Jun 29

38th #daily and it's not late and I'm caught up now! More tinkering with overlapping #blue #hexagon grids in #inkscape. Inkscapes built-in patter fills don't really give me as much control as I want, so I'll have to investigate other techniques (or just doing everything in code instead)

A computer drawing. The background is filled with a radial gradient, centered near the center of the image, that fades from a lighter blue to a darker blue. Overlayed on the background are 4 hexagonal grids in different shades of blue, which all have one vertex in common with the center of the background gradient. The 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grids are rotated 5, 10, and 15 degrees with respect to the 1st grid. ike blue 2026

ike blue@ike· Jun 29

37th #daily and it’s late, on the 38th day! This is a study for an idea I want to animate. I used way more construction lines and marks than I needed to, and I traced over them to highlight the process. It’s also more practice controlling my lines and shading with colored pencils.

A colored pencil drawing on paper. A regular hexagon is constructed inside a blue circle. Some straight lines and arc segments are traced over with blue. The hexagon is divided into smaller irregular hexagons in a sort of stripy fashion that all include the leftmost and rightmost vertices of the outer hexagon. The irregular hexagons are filled in with two shades of blue, alternating to highlight the stripe effect. ike blue 2026

ike blue@ike· Jun 28

36th #daily. I was going to try and draw something like Day 35 but in #Inkscape... and then I got distracted playing with stacked offset #blue #hexagonal patterns. I want to develop this general idea further.

A coimputer drawing, On a subtle blue gradient background, four layers of blue hexagon grids are stacked but offset from each other. ike blue 2026

ike blue@ike· Jun 27

Day 35. At my local sketch and kvetch, I tinkered with using a ruler and angle to try drawing a hexagonal honeycomb. It was interesting to see how quickly it got irregular over larger distances away from where I started. Then I swung some circles and did some coloring. #blue #hexagonal #daily

A photograph of a colored pencil drawing on paper. Lots of overlapping marks by a number of different shades of blue colored pencil. There are construction marks, circles, and a grid of more or less regular hexagons. Each hexagon has an inscribed circle and a central dot. ike blue 2026

ike blue@ike· Jun 26

Day 34. I fooled around with a bunch of stuff today, but ended up adding stuff to Day 20's piece. I think that counts as new art?

Image of an SVG drawing. A lot of blurred hexagons attempt to create a scene like a red-yellow torch (blurry irregular hexagons) at the mouth of a dark blue hexagonal tunnel. The tunnel has a line of glowing blue dots (hexagons) along the bottom. at the end of the tunnel is a glowing hexagonal star. ike blue 2026

ike blue@ike· Jun 24

Day 33 of #daily #blue #hexagonal #art. After Day 25, I was wondering what it would be like to make an alphabet out of hexagons, so this is my attempt at it. I think G was the hardest letter for me to figure out.

A digital image of a computer drawing. On a light blue background, there are 25 irregular hexagons and one regular hexagon. Each hexagon is shaped so that it looks like a capital letter in the English alphabet. The letter O is a regular hexagon with an intense blue outline and a lighter blue fill color. ike blue 2026

ike blue@ike· Jun 24

Day 32 of daily blue hexagonal art. Today we have an adjusted photograph of some holographic vinyl. This material will probably show up in future days posts.

A digital photo of a piece of holographic vinyl material under white LED light. The vinyl is showing a spectrum-colored hexagonal pattern, and some of the hexagons are blue. Holographic objects like this display shifting colors and patterns as the angle of illumination and observation change. ike blue 2026

ike blue@ike· Jun 23

Day 31! A whole month of #daily #blue #hexagonal #art. This is a photo of a glow-in-dark hexagonal bowl I cast from epoxy with glow pigments in a cheap silicone mold. The camera does not capture the colors well, but I still like how the photo looks.