Swedish Forest
written by danieljulia.tez
Why a Scandinavian forest?
The motivation was clear. For me it is the perfect landscape. Since I was a child, my mother, who was born in Sweden, has always tried to pass on the values of this country, one of which is the love of nature, and when were little me and my siblings were taken often to the forest, both there in Sweden and here in the Pyrenees, where the ecosystem is incredibly similar.
I have always liked to walk in the woods, either during my annual stays in Sweden, or, as often as I can, in the Pyrenees.
If I were to freeze time somewhere in the world, or reincarnate in the future, the place would be undoubtedly some corner of these woods. A walk in the forest brings us many benefits. A therapy already known as "forest bathing", or in the Japanese tradition, shinrin-yoku.
Drawing nature
If I wanted to draw a forest I had to start with the smallest and most characteristic in a forest of this type, and that is undoubtedly the blueberry plants. These plants cover much of the ground in these places.
So the first thing I did was drawing a blueberry plant in svg, I used as a resource the photos I took in the forest, as well as the botanical description in the wikipedia and other sources.
Then I did tests to see how a forest could be "populated" with these plants, for me it would be paradise, a forest full of blueberries!
Coded illustration
One thing I was clear about was that I didn't want to do something realistic or photographic, but an illustration. I'm not an illustrator but I've always had a passion for drawing and making comics.
And I tried to give it a drawing look. Don't hide the lines, on the contrary.
Draw with code, instead of dragging the pencil, with svg instructions, basically making lines and polygons. I also didn't want to use gradients or textures. Escape from bitmap textures. And of course all without using any resource or library, except for the treatment of colors and noise, which I will talk about later.
Other plant species
After the blueberry plant it was necessary to make other characteristic species, and I chose two more, the red cranberries (in fact lingonberries) and the bramble (Calluna vulgaris). In total these 3 understory plants are the ones that predominate in any Scandinavian forest (and in the Pyrenees except for red cranberries)
From here I was encouraged to continue with the project. It was beginning to look really good.
Once I knew which plants I wanted to reproduce I started by drawing them and perfecting them. They needed to have a different appearance in each season of the year. For example, blueberries bear fruit in summer, in autumn the leaves change color and begin to fall, in winter they have no leaves, in spring there are no fruits and the leaves are greener, etc. .
Historical references of forest illustration in Sweden
Forest illustration has a great tradition in Sweden, and many of these images have captivated me since I was a child.
Starting with John Bauer, a reproduction of which I have seen hanging at home since I was a child. And some others by Carl Larsson.
And this tradition is still maintained today, not only in art but in comics. As in “Pettson och Findus” some illustrated stories that I recently discovered, drawn and written by Sven Nordqvist
And of course this art in the form of illustration is also a very Japanese tradition, among others, Yoshida Hiroshi.
Digital crafting vs AI
In this project I‘ve done digital crafting, in the sense that I didn’t use any library, nor resource, nor images to create the illustrations. The illustration is made only from very simple lines, with just a few code instructions to generate svg.
For example to create the trunks of the trees I didn't use any real texture, everything is drawn based on lines. I don’t even use gradients.
In other words, it has nothing to do with an artificial intelligence algorithm. Nowadays it is very easy to create with one of these algorithms an image of a forest from a sentence, but I think it's entirely something else.
Below an image generated by Dall-e from the prompt “An illustration of an Scandinavian forest with blueberry undergrowth in summer” for you to compare. Interestingly, the composition is very similar to some of the outputs in my project, although the details are very different.
Almost no libraries
In fact I barely use libraries, except in two cases.
Simplex-noise https://www.npmjs.com/package/simplex-noise
I use the noise both to add some global texture (when not in parallax mode) and specially for the “plant clustering”. Using a regular random function would generate a very random/not natural clustering of plants. With this noise function I think it feels much more natural.
Color https://www.npmjs.com/package/color
I use this color library to generate variations on the colors. The base colors are all picked by hand from real photos, and they try to be faithful to reality, but i use some variations in form of “object gradients”, I mean, instead of using a gradient inside the fill of the svg objects I generate a gradient based on the position of every plant. For instance from left to right, etc. In many different internal features. I also use this library to generate the “crazy” color feature, which chooses random not-natural colors.
Polar coordinates and recursion
Computers work with pixels and cartesian coordinates. But nature works rather in polar coordinates, that is to say with directions and distances. To draw a line in polar coordinates we need only an initial point, a direction and a length.
All code in this project is based in polar coordinates.
If we add to this the concept of recursion, we have the basic resources to be able to generate much more organic and natural things. We can see the recursion in every branch of trees and plants. The recursion plays very well in conjunction with the randomness, so in the case of a plant it may have more or less branches and in different directions based on the random output.
The trees
Another element of the forest is the trees. In forests of this type there are basically 3 species. Firs, pines and birches. I considered that it was not necessary for the leaves to be seen, except in the case of birch trees. When you're inside the forest, you can hardly see the tops of the trees, and the trunks represent this landscape. Often in addition we find rotten and half-fallen trunks that I have tried to represent.
Other elements of the composition
Another important element in forests are stones. Since they are of glacial origin, they are everywhere in scandinavian forests, and they are of this round type. In certain parts of the woods there are only stones, and that's something I've tried to represent.
In winter, snow is also an important element. Not only is it on the ground but there is a certain probability that it will fall from the sky. In this case, however, time is frozen. The forest landscape is a snapshot in time.
Layout and composition
The composition of the forest is perhaps one of the things that has taken me the most work. It was necessary to make slopes and order the elements from the back to the front in several layers. with some distance between them but not too much. Combining all of them with different algorithms and variations, etc. The noise has been useful to create a realistic distribution of the direfent plants and objects.
Parallax
The idea of making a parallax-like effect came naturally from the layered layout. The layers move with user interaction creating an effect that we could call 2.5D, since it is not real 3D.
Adding some proportional blur makes the effect more realistic.
In order to create this effect the svg had to be converted to several images that are animated in a 2D canvas. The process is quite graphic-extensive and required a lot of tweaking until it worked seamlessly.
Paint modes
Since my idea was from the beginning drawing with code and create an illustration, at some point, I realized I could create as a feature several "paint modes".
The normal paint mode is when a I use a color for the fill ( a realistic color) and more thick or thin black ink for the lines. This is the most likely mode of all.
Later I tried other modes. For instance the "paint" mode, where instead of black lines for the strokes I would use the same color as the fill, the result looks like more "oil painted".
Then another paint mode would be the "stroke" mode, where the color is in the line and the fill remains white. It seems like a drawing make with a marker.
Finally I decided to add a "BlackOnWhite" and "WhiteOnBlack" modes that I like a lot and emphasizes the fact I want this project to be an illustration. These modes are more rare.
Following a similar landscape in the 5 paint modes.
Features
At the moment the features are the following
(the names may change in the final version)
Layout: Portrait, Landscape and Square.
PredominantSpecies: Blueberry, LingonBerry, Calluna, Rocks, None.
Trees: PinesAndFirs, Birches, Mixed, None
Season: Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter
DayNight: Day, Night
PaintStyle: Normal, Stroke, Paint, BlackOnWhite, WhiteOnBlack
ColorStyle: Normal, Crazy.
HasLake: True,False.
There are also several "internal" features that i decided not to make public, like if it's snowing or not, the amount of snow, etc.
Some curiosities
As it should be every mint has always the same output, except for one thing. The moon shows the real moon phase based on the current date!
Also, the lines that do the reflections in the lake are actually the morse code of the fxhash hash!!
The working process
To finish this article I liked to talk about the working process.
At the moment I am not a full-time dedicated artist. But I think this can have some advantages. Since I'm very excited about the project, even though I can't work on it all the hours I'd like, while I'm not working on it I often turn it around, and I end up finding solutions and ideas that I apply on the next day.
Therefore, it ends up becoming a job where day by day, with a lot of patience and a lot of time, I apply improvements and ideas that I have had during the previous 24 hours.
