It’s always interesting to see what comes from random encounters in both life and on the internet. While winding up the Easter break, I spot an interesting post on Bluesky:
It’s such a bizarre image and the request was so oddly specific that I had to do a bit of digging. Bob Widlar seems to be a very prominent person in electronic engineering with a personality, so I can imagine to some niche population he’s somewhat of a legend.
Searching “PBC silkscreen” tells me that it’s basically the printing of text that goes on circuit boards to identify various parts. So it makes sense that eric wanted some kind of image to print onto a green circuit board.
Another guy knew that he could use a high pass filter to generate a reasonably straightforward black and white image, see below.
A high pass filter is usually heard of in audio engineering where it filters out high frequencies beyond a certain threshold. However one can apply similar intuition to black and white images by setting a threshold where on one side, everything gets converted to white, and the rest is converted to black.
Unfortunately it’s not perfect, you can see several specks, typically referred to as ‘noise’. So from there a bit of manual cleanup is required, which is where I volunteered. Eric was adamant in not wanting to use any kind of AI, and given the unique and bespoke nature of this request it looked like something I could take on.
Now my digital art skills aren’t that great, but I definitely know my way around digital art programs moreso than the layman and do have a graphics tablet and stylus, so away we go!
There were a few interesting hiccups in between where I forgot Eric wanted it on a very small 10mm x 10mm section of his circuit board, meaning that when the image is shrunk a lot of detail is lost, so I had to be sure to clean up a lot of small details.
I wish I could talk about what I was thinking while I was cleaning up the image, but a lot of it was mostly vibes, trying one or two things, then zooming out to check.It’s interesting just how much of it can’t be described in words but at the same time I didn’t know what would be the right way to go, I just had to try various things along the way.
The whole thing took about…3-4 hours over two evenings, and it’d been a while since I’d been so focused on anything digital art related. Nonetheless given my amateur skill level I’m quite happy with myself for even trying. This idea really resonated with me in terms of ‘oddly specific’ requests, given that a lot of various things I like to do tend to also be ‘oddly specific’, or bespoke, if you will.
But yeah. Actual digital art that I want to draw? Still gotta sharpen my skills and acquire more know how. And that’s going to take a while.
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