Creating Perfectly Looping Animations With Python

The Art of Pattern: Henri Matisse and Japanese Woodcut Artists

Whenever you think something might not be connected, art has a way to show you it is. The Baltimore Museum of Art invites you to question the use of colors and patterns in art by combining the works of Matisse with Japanese woodcut artists in one exhibition.

In contrast to Matisse, Japanese woodcut artists working in the 19th century depicted their female subjects more often in public spaces clothed in layers of ornately decorated robes. Prints by some of Japan’s most popular woodcut artists—Kikugawa Eizan, Keisai Eisen, and Utagawa Kunisada—show glamorized courtesans and entertainers frequently depicted as though on parade. The exhibition also features a vibrant sash supplementing those shown in the prints.

Halloween Skeleton Transformation Illusion Prop #LED Strips #AdafruitLearningSystem @Adafruit

Check out the latest tutorial from Erin St Blaine: build a Halloween illusion that transforms your face into the face of a skeleton or monster. This prop can also be used to blend your face with your friend’s face. It uses a Feather ESP32 board and NeoPixel LEDs with a 2-way mirror to create all the spookiness.

From the guide:

Get spooky this year with a magical halloween coffin that holds a surprise inside. A 2-way mirror and an array of animated lights creates a face-blending illusion, melting your face into a creepy skeleton or other Halloween monster. You can also prop this up and blend two human faces together, creating a very creepy and surreal experience.

This project requires a little soldering and some software installation, but no coding. We’re using an ESP32 Feather board to program and control our lights over WiFi, so you can control and change the colors or animations with your smart phone or any web-enabled browser.

This illusion was inspired by TANZER’s Infinity Boxes, and first created by us for Maker Faire 2024, where we built it inside a Love Tree. It turned out so good that we wanted to recreate it to scare the kids in our neighborhood on Halloween!

Content Summary:
– The guide provides instructions on creating a Halloween prop that uses an illusion to transform the viewer’s face into a skeleton when they peek inside a coffin.
– It includes details on setting up lighting effects that enhance the illusion, making for a spooky and memorable Halloween experience.

Adafruit Products Used:
– The project utilizes the Adafruit NeoPixel LED strips for customizable and vibrant lighting effects. (https://www.adafruit.com/category/168)
– An Adafruit microcontroller is used to control the NeoPixel LEDs and coordinate the lighting to create the desired illusion effect. (https://www.adafruit.com/category/17)

Read more at Halloween Skeleton Transformation Illusion Prop

Tutorial: DIY Star Crown Hedy Lamarr Cosplay – Fun Beginner Project

Check out the latest Learn Guide from Erin St Blaine: Make a star crown inspired by the headdress worn by Hedy Lamarr in Zeitgeist Girl (1941). This is a fantastic beginner project that requires a little soldering and some crafting skills, but no coding at all. Learn to install WLED on a microcontroller and hook up Adafruit’s new star-shaped NeoPixels. The crown is made from an inexpensive headband with zip ties for the spokes.

Full tutorial: https://learn.adafruit.com/neopixel-star-crown-with-wled/overview

From the guide:

Sparkle like a 1940s starlet with this DIY star crown, inspired by the iconic Hedy Lamarr in Ziegfeld Girl (1941).

Hedy Lamarr wasn’t just another Hollywood beauty—she was also a fearless inventor, and wicked smart. While making headlines with her glamorous and sometimes scandalous roles (like in Ecstasy, where she became famous for one of Hollywood’s earliest nude scenes), Hedy was secretly working on a groundbreaking invention to help win World War II. She co-created a “frequency hopping” system to keep Allied torpedoes safe from jamming. That tech became the foundation for what we now use in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

In this tutorial, we’ll channel that mix of glam and genius to make a modern, glowing star crown with NeoPixel stars and WLED, perfect for cosplaying the timeless Hedy or adding some sparkle to your next event. Let’s dive into some Old Hollywood glam meets high-tech magic.

 

Adafruit QT Py Pico: https://www.adafruit.com/product/5395
NeoPixel Star LEDs: https://www.adafruit.com/product/5982

Illustrations of Pottery from an Imagined Past #ArtTuesday

Here’s a story that isn’t true: a group of esotericists create an imaginary country built out of alternate mathematics, aesthetics, and philosophies. To make the world feel, they write an encyclopedia enumerating in bland, painstaking details of their imagined country. In the same way that the original encyclopedia brought the our own world into the imaginations of people all over Europe, this encyclopedia of the imagined country is so real, so specific, so alien, so plain, so clear, that it begins to manifest on the real world. Like an invasion of the imagination, the imaginary country soon overtakes our own, and we find ourselves in a world that never was. That’s an imaginary story that may well be the plot of a short story by a certain Argentinian writer of some renown.

Here’s a story that is true: in 2022 Vorja Sánchez self-published his own volume of an imaginary world, Invisible Home. Sánchez’s work could easily have invaded from an imaginary country. His poetry in particular feels like something one might find if they fell into a Pottery Barn from another world. Here’s more from  imaginary from COLOSSAL:

Beastly jugs and vessels with legs comprise the latest in illustrator Vorja Sánchez’s eclectic and uncanny menagerie. A new print titled “Ancient Pottery” draws inspiration from a wide variety of stoneware urns, bowls, and statuettes from prehistoric cultures around the world, imbuing each of them with the lively features of animals or mythological beings. Produced from an original piece made with pencil, ink, and watercolor on cotton paper, the artist emphasizes the appearance of age, as if a patina has formed over time across the entire composition.

“I am fascinated by the simple and imperfect but pure and free forms of ancient ceramics,” Sánchez tells Colossal.

See more!

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Every Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!

Laurie Anderson’s Recycled Sound #ArtTuesday #Music

Musician Laurie Anderson has a spin on reusing magnetic tape to create new sounds. She created a violin bow strung with audio tape instead of horse hair.

By drawing the bow across the violin strings, she can play the sound captured on the section of tape backwards and forwards.

Laurie Anderson repurposed a section of tape to say a phrase in Dutch when drawn forwards across the strings. By pulling the bow back, the phrase is played backwards, sounding out a phrase in English. What an inventive way to repurpose not only an old audio tape, but also sound itself!

Check out the video below. To see more of Laurie Anderson’s musical inventions, take a look at her website: http://www.laurieanderson.com/. Via Replayground and Reddit.

And someone tried to recreate the instrument 3 years ago – Reddit.

Header photo via the Internet Archive

Radio Shack logos over the years #ShackToberFest

RadioShack is an American consumer electronics brand originally created as such a chain of stores in 1921 under the name “The Radio Shack Corporation.” Radio Shack used a number of logos over the years.  Logopedia has a list of them.

On the heels of #SepTandy, Adafruit is celebrating #ShackToberFest, a celebration of all things Radio Shack and Tandy. Tag your social media posts #ShackToberFest!

Intricate Lighting Circuit Sequencing #VintageLighting

Like an old player piano this light sequencer uses a large drum and physical contacts. Looks like a bit of a fire hazard but its fascinating to see!

From thatwasDope on YouTube

You can learn more about this method from this post on Nandita Palchouchuri

Around 1960-65, as a result of the ingenuity of pioneers like Sridhar Das and a handful of others ,festive decorations using large electric bulbs began to emerge.They were created in order to embellish the temporary Cloth Temples(Pandal)that house the deity Goddess Jagadhatri and Goddess Durga during the Dushehra festival, each year.

With passing years these panels have become very intricate and cleverly designed and occupy a very integral part in the making of the Durga festival ,diwali ,wedding marquees etc. A large number of contractors building these light panels now thrive in Bengal largely centred around Chandannagar.

And a good discussion on the forum here: Identifying a vintage lighting sequencer method

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Thankfully if you want to create an impressive lighting display you won’t need to rely on such an elaborate set-up.

• LIGHTSHIP: LED Animation over WiFi
• SmartMatrix Remote Controlled LED Art Display

Feather RP2040 SCORPIO

We just love sticking NeoPixels anywhere and everywhere. When we saw the new “PIO” feature of the RP2040 from Raspberry Pi, we knew it would be perfect for driving huge numbers of NeoPixels. So we created the Adafruit Feather RP2040 SCORPIO specifically for NeoPixel (WS2812-compatible) control, but also good for various other PIO-based projects that want to take advantage of the Feather pinout with an additional 8 consecutive outputs (or inputs).

Using LEDs to Make Sculptures #ArtTuesday

LEDs are affecting the world of art installations, fine art, and the performing arts. You can start at home with projects like Dano Wall’s Glue Stick Light Pipe Sculpture using Circuit Playground Express or you can explore the work being done by artists all over the world. Here’s more from the Interactive/Immersive:

Interactive art installations are reshaping how we experience creativity, and challenging traditional art forms. It’s not just about looking at art; it’s about being a part of it and being totally immersed in it (like the Immersive Van Gogh exhibit you might have heard about).

In this blog post, we’ll explore six intriguing examples of interactive art. From interactive digital art installations that responds to your touch, to collaborations blending human and artificial intelligence and 3D installation art or projection mapping, these interactive and experiential art pieces offer a unique interaction with contemporary art, where the distinction between viewer and creator becomes less defined.

See more!

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Every Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!

Stationery themed hotel room in Japan #ArtTuesday

JetPens shared this video on Youtube! They also have an excelent Kokuyo Campus Factory Tour where you can see how the iconic Kokuyo Campus Notebooks are made

We got the chance to visit a stationery themed hotel room in Japan! The walls were decorated with Kokuyo stationery products, and there were even plushies that looked like huge erasers and rulers! If you visit Japan, be sure to check out Villa Fontaine Haneda Airport Garden Hotel.

Creating the Harriet Tubman commemorative coin

Creating the Harriet Tubman commemorative coin –

The 2024 Harriet Tubman Commemorative Coin Program recognizes the bicentennial of Harriet Tubman’s birth and her lifework that spans beyond liberation. Hear from voices across the U.S. Mint about the creation of this collection, showcasing significant periods in Tubman’s pursuit of social justice and representing different eras of her extraordinary life.

Read more & video.

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Related:

• How to 3D Print molds for custom Stamps.
• Hey Steven Mnuchin, making Harriet Tubman $20s seems totally OK.

Color Chart Re-Created with Cars #ArtTuesday

If you ever decide to become a theatrical lighting desigenr or painter or makeup artist, you may at some point coma cross an astonishing book called The Interactions of Color. Written by Josef Albers, the book teaches readers to see colors in an entirely new way. What do the gradtions of shading look like? What do red and blue look like when set down side by side? Albers lays out the interactions of color in a unique way. But even Albers doesn’t quite do what Fred Battle pulls off in his 2019 work, Solara. Here’s more from COLOSSAL:

For his 2019 installation “Solara,” the artist painted the exteriors of 144 dilapidated vehicles from the 60s to 90s with vibrant colors. Hoods, roofs, and trunks shine once again with bold hues corresponding to an RGB color value, their codes written on the bonnet.

“I decided to create this color chart by observing the action of the sun on the horizontal surfaces of these cars,” Battle wrote. “As each of these cars has had its proper life as an object, then applying one specific color on each reveals its singularity, its personal and particular use.”

See the project!

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Every Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!

Meet the Italian ‘Fruit Detective’ Who Investigates Centuries-Old Paintings for Clues About Produce That Has Disappeared From the Kitchen Table

This recent piece from Smithsonian Magazine explores the loveliest intersection between science and art. Dalla Ragione is an Italian scientist who earned a PhD in biodiversity from the University of Perugia. Specifically, she’s a tree fruit expert who puts 15th and 16th paintings in at the center of her research.

Her nonprofit, Archeologia Arborea, is helping farmers and governments around the world preserve and even bring back into cultivation all manner of forgotten fruits. In the process, Dalla Ragione has become a globally renowned fruit detective, by recognizing in her country’s Renaissance artworks not only exceptional examples of cultural patrimony but also hidden messages from a bygone era of genetic abundance that can offer clues about how to recover what was seemingly lost.

Read the full piece here.

And for more fruit-forward content, check out these guides from our Learn System:

• FruitBox Sequencer: Musically Delicious Step Pattern Generator
• Circuit Playground Express: Piano in the Key of Lime
• Circuit Playground Fruit Drums

Go Behind the Scenes of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’s Stop-Motion Art

Warner Bros. Entertainment allows viewers a behind the scenes look at the stop-motion art of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice with Tim Burton, Tommy Harper, Ian Mackinnon, Glenn Holberton, Chris Tichborne, Andy Biddle, Malcolm Hadley, Beth Jupe, Paul Davies, Kevin Scillitoe, Fabrice Pieton and Anna Pearson on YouTube.

Learn more about Stop Motion Animation from John Park in the Adafruit Learning System

“The Starry Night” Follows Laws of Physics That Weren’t Discovered Yet #ArtTuesday

Science and art have always been inextricably linked. Before ‘art’ and ‘science’ were subjects in a text book scientist and artists were one and the same.

Fascinating discovery in Physics of Fluids. Van Gogh, knowingly or not, accurately depicted fluid mechanics. Laws of physics that wouldn’t be proven for decades. This depiction isn’t only on the broad strokes either: “On a microscopic scale, the scientists found that the brushstrokes and the visual effects of the paints’ viscosity also align with Batchelor’s law”

Did he know? Was it keen observation, intuition or coinidence?

Via Hyperallergic:

The research team examined the length of, space between, and varying luminance of van Gogh’s brushstrokes from each of the 14 whirling eddies in “The Starry Night,” and found that the composition intrinsically observes Richardson–Kolmogorov’s cascade picture of turbulence, specifically Kolmogorov’s −5/3 Power Law. Put simply, this predicts that turbulent flows experience energy cascades during which larger eddies transfer some of their energy into smaller ones, and that those, in turn, transfer their energy into even smaller eddies, and so on.

Read more! And in the paper Hidden turbulence in van Gogh’s The Starry Night

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Add some real motion to Starry Night, and lights! With the Circuit Playground Express and Adafruit CRICKIT for Circuit Playground Express using Living Starry Night Painting on Learn.Adafruit

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Every Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!

Early Home Computers in the work of Lola Dupre #ArtTuesday

Onc day Americans woke up to discover that home computers sat on their desks. These home computers soon brought with them the world wide web, smuggling the entire world into suburban homes from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon. Home computers transformed our families, our relationships, our the way we make our decisions. Nowadays we walk around with proof of that complete transformation in the form of smart phones. The work of painter Lola Dupre helps us remember just how strange home computers really are. Here’s more from COLOSSAL:

[Lola Dupre] continues her disorienting manipulations with a pair of early Apple desktops, ships with enough stories to rival a high-rise, and a cow so bloated she needs eight legs to stand. Each work pushes the limits of legibility as limbs and common objects undergo exaggerated distortions.

See Dupre’s work here!

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Every Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!

Engineezy’s Marble Machine Makes Pixel Art

Engineezy uses a color sensor and stepper motor to detect and sort different color marbles in their pixel art marble machine

Learn how to make glowy pixel based art in the Adafruit Learning System:

• 32×32 Square Pixel Art Animation Display
• LED Matrix Display for Bitmap Pixel Art and Animation
• MakeCode Arcade Pixel Art Sprites
• LED Glasses Custom Animated Graphics with Sprites
• 
  Matrix Portal RGB Display Handbag
• Matrix Portal Money-Sensing Tip Jar

Artist David Fay Creates a SuperPlasTic Sculpture and a Steampunk Octopus

Artist David Fay created a SuperPlasTic Sculpture and a Steampunk Octopus using our very own Adafruit HalloWing M0 Express. We love the creativity and craftsmanship at work here!

David shared some project details with us directly:

My name is David Fay and I teamed up with SuperPlastic to
create a one of a kind figure for their SuperPlastic Area15

@superplastic meets @sloninaartspace! This incredible art show is opening
Oct 12 at Slonina ARTSpace, to celebrate the upcoming opening of a new
interactive #Superplastic attraction coming to @area15official this Fall.

You will notice that I used your Halowing to create the awesome eye effect
for my super plastic action figure…
Well the folks at SLoNiNa ArtSpAcE and SuperPlastic have given me race
reviews on my submission for the amazing upcoming event!
This is not the only piece I have created with the amazing adafruit eyes. I
have Austin used them in my obsolete sculptures I create for the Venetian
hotel and casino which is a little typewriter that is writing its final
story and crying tears of ink as it has become obsolete. I also recently
used the eyes for a steampunk style octopus. I will share links to those
videos as well. Thanks Adafruit for really giving me that lil extra when it comes to
creating really awesome and fun art!

Project videos and links below:

SuperPlastic + UberKranky + HesSoFay + PoPPiN-oFF-B.S. by David Fay

Nautilus: a Steampunk Metal Art Octopus Sculpture by: David Fay

Erwin Wurm: One Minute Sculptures

Yorkshire Sculpture Park shared this video on Youtube!

Ewrin Wurm is best known for his One Minute Sculptures – an ongoing series of works where the artist gives written or drawn instructions for participants to pose with ordinary objects such as buckets, fruit or chairs.

See more!

Tutorial: Fog Machine with Motion-Reaction and IOT Internet Control with Adafruit IO

Ready to make this Halloween your spookiest yet? Imagine a fog machine that knows exactly when to send out a burst of spine-chilling mist—right as trick-or-treaters approach your haunted house. Or picture remotely activating it to blanket your yard in eerie fog, all from your phone, as you sit back and watch the show. Sounds like a dream, right? Well, we’ve got a treat (or maybe a trick!) for you.

In our latest tutorial from Erin St Blaine, we’re giving you the power to transform an ordinary fog machine into a motion-reactive scare machine using a PIR sensor and make it controllable from anywhere with Adafruit IO. Whether you’re hosting the ultimate Halloween party, setting up a haunted house, or just want to give the neighbors a thrill, this project will turn the spooky dial up to eleven!

Check out the tutorial here!

Why Settle for Ordinary When You Can Have Spooky Magic?

A standard fog machine is pretty cool on its own—who doesn’t love a yard full of mysterious mist on Halloween night? But with a little bit of tech magic, you can take your fog game to the next level. We’re talking motion-reactive fog that surprises guests when they least expect it. It’s like your house can feel when someone’s near and knows exactly when to make them jump!

With the help of a PIR motion sensor, your fog machine will become an interactive Halloween prankster, responding to motion and giving your unsuspecting visitors the fright they came for. And with Adafruit IO, you can control the fog output remotely, meaning you can sit back, sip some cider, and unleash the fog at just the right moment to keep everyone guessing.

How Does It Work?

The tutorial makes it super easy to get started. You’ll need a standard fog machine, a QT Py Pico board, a PIR sensor, and some help from Adafruit IO. Don’t worry—no need to be an expert in electronics to get this spooky effect going! The instructions will walk you through each step, from wiring it all together to getting your foggy creation running smoothly.

Once it’s set up, your fog machine will be able to sense motion with the PIR sensor, sending out an ominous burst of mist whenever someone gets too close. Plus, with the addition of Adafruit IO, you’ll have the power to activate the fog from anywhere in the world—imagine the look on your guests’ faces when the fog suddenly rolls in while you’re not even in the room!

Perfect for Parties, Haunted Houses, or Just Scaring the Neighbors

Halloween is all about creating a spooky, magical atmosphere, and nothing says “eerie” quite like unexpected bursts of mist creeping through your haunted decor. Use your new remote-triggered fog machine for:

• A Halloween Party Atmosphere: Keep the fog rolling all night long, controlling it from your phone whenever the music hits just right.
• Trick-or-Treat Surprises: When kids come up to ring your doorbell, let the motion sensor trigger an eerie cloud of fog—it’s an easy, harmless way to make your house unforgettable.
• Haunted House Fun: Create a truly interactive haunted house experience that reacts to visitors without you needing to lift a finger.

Get Spooky (and Techy) This Halloween!

Halloween is the one time of year when we get to fully embrace our creativity, and what better way than combining spooky decor with some nifty DIY tech? This fog machine hack is the perfect addition to any Halloween setup—whether you’re a seasoned maker or just looking to add a touch of magic to your yard.

So grab your fog machine, break out the soldering iron, and get ready to give your neighborhood a foggy surprise they won’t forget! Check out the full tutorial here and make this Halloween your spookiest one yet.

Happy Haunting, and Happy Hacking! 👻🕸️✨

Full tutorial: https://learn.adafruit.com/fog-machine-remote-trigger

Video Intro: https://youtu.be/kAANojGhvZ4