Show HN: Art – draw one stroke, let symmetry complete it (mrdee.in)

Cool! I got a weird feeling when playing with it, it's just something very satisfying in seeing it be completed

Now we just need the mobile app

The actual drawing experience is really satisfying. A couple usability tweaks I did just fiddling in the DOM: - Put the output and inputs side by side - Put the "actions", export, clear, etc. pinned to the bottom - The overall goal being zero scrolling

After that it was quite fun and I enjoyed the options you gave for things like brush size, metallics, gradients, etc. Nice!

fwiw Krita has a similar setting in its brush tool - you draw a stroke and said brush stroke is mirrored by a given x axis or a given y axis (or both)

Ha! I added a similar feature to Open Brush: https://docs.openbrush.app/user-guide/multimirror

And learned a bit about group theory in the process... :-/

( https://github.com/IxxyXR/unity-symmetry )

Cool!

I made a similar thing for my kids (they wanted something similar to the kaleidoscopic drawing you can do in some ‘Monument Valley’ levels

https://mirror-it.staticdomains.app/index.html

When I scroll down to select a different color for my next stroke, the canvas resets.

"Mirror" mode was my favorite feature on the Koala Pad app back in the 1980s.

Hm... is this technically a mandala? I mean - does it suffice for something to have radial symmetry to be called a mandala?

Bro this is hypnotic lol i spent 15 mins on this without even realising

I spent a lot of time playing with a similar tool in Deluxe Paint as a kid.

As a programmer, maths researcher, and painter, there’s certainly something satisfying (to me) when an artistically symmetrical piece observe no mathematically symmetry: The very asymmetry in the language used to describe is in and of itself, beautiful.

Even with the perfect math, i made it ugly, lol. But it got me hypnotized, spent 10 minutes in a blink of an eye.

we clearly need the mobile app

This reminded me of such good memories of playing with http://weavesilk.com/. Nice to see someone with a similar concept.

The control panel should have been on the side instead of below the image. I scroll to bottom, mandalla disappears on top in the screen, I click generate, then I scroll back up, repeat.

[dead]

I tried this concept over a decade ago: https://www.nayuki.io/page/symmetry-sketcher-javascript

I was probably inspired by mouse-painting tools in Corel Photo-Paint (like Adobe Photoshop) that have an "orbits" feature. https://product.corel.com/help/PHOTO-PAINT/540111130/Main/EN...

lots of fun! like etch-a-sketch, lite-brite, spirograph, paint, etc. on steroids!!

Feature request it would be fun to draw snowflakes but to do that there'd have to be another setting to constrain things you draw to be straight lines at just the angles that ice crystals would allow.

[dead]

Suggestion OP if you would like one:

Support click-and-spin with momentum: I clicked outside the mandala and quick-dragged horizontally, hoping this would spin the mandala.

You could support zero-friction and momentum, slowly stopping.

In either this unlocks a dramatically new aesthetic: clicking on the rotating surface draws splines. The mapping of gesture-to-line (hence mandala elements) changes completely.

There are some complications, intuitively one might expect "pottery wheel mode" where symmetry is not enabled... I think that would be "unlearned" however.

[delayed]

Love this. I had something almost identical on my Commodore 64 40 years ago that you could use with the joystick or KoalaPad.

Nice! Kinda reminds me this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirograph