Pixel Picasso

I love Pixel Art! I especially enjoy the minimal use of colors and the abstract way artists can use simple squares to create. The trouble is, pixels are kind of... square. Art with restrictions can be a good thing. With today’s high resolution display, why not break out of the box? Perhaps use triangles and circles? Or squares with a nice corner radius... squircles. That is the goal of Pixel Picasso.

On an iOS device the system recognizes touch based on x and y coordinates. Simple Circles, Squares, and Rounded Circles can just be plotted along a 2D grid. I had to brush up on my algebra skills to determine how to calculate triangle paths. Basically if x is greater y you have a triangle. By using 4 formulas I can create a triangle quadrant. I use that to create “Triangle Pixels” that no longer conform to old standards. Each pixel can be drawn using a Bezier Path. I am working on the SwiftUI version that will use the Shape class.

Designing the app is my favorite part! I am not a designer but I pretend to be once in a while. As I figure out where to add buttons I realize how good design seems very easy but in reality it’s a lot of work! For me, this is good enough for now. One thing to notice is the Quad Triangle Grid and the Alternating Triangle Grid look very similar but they are not! I’ve started to see both of these patterns in architecture features such as windows. You’ll see that the triangles create slightly different looks as they tesselate. It should make for an interesting app!

The app is taking longer to build than I expected. It’s mostly because I’m a perfectionist. I went through several revisions on the color picker. I launched two versions, one for iPhone and another for iPad. I used UIKit and storyboards. With the release of SwiftUI I would like to build this into something more robust. I have some Isometric grids I’ve been working on which would be a great addition to the app!

The iPad version allowed me to add more colors along the bottom and also have an RGB/Hex color picker. The drawing component is rather slow and I have some ideas why. It’s on my backlog of things to fix.