Enlighten Maren
Animated portrait of Maren by Dr. Olaf Hoffmann, Hannover 2007.
The portrait shows a female person named Maren.
The title is no typo and it is intended to be a little bit ironic and ambiguous
and is related to the animation of the colour gradients of the false colour
rendering applied to simplified paths feigning the impression of an abstracted
portrait of Maren. The elliptical gradients are centered approximately in
Maren's face to focus the view of the audience on her beautiful likeness.
Maren itself needs sometimes some friendly colours and light in her life in
contrast to some dark moments, we all know from our own experience.
A digital raster image of Maren is used to derive some contour paths with the
program potrace used as a module in the program inkscape. These paths are
simplified and manually optimised using inkscape. With a selfmade PHP script
the code produced by inkscape is cleaned up, paths are rounded and the
gradients and the animation are supplemented.
The final result is a PHP script with random choosen gradients in two
variants, to be selectable with the GET parameter n. if n is a multiple of 3,
the background is a gradient and the paths are only stroked, else the
paths are filled with different coloured gradients.
Optionally the parameters x and y can be used to modify the width and
height of the image per default in px. With the parameter m another
unit can be choosen, either %, mm or cm.