I was fortunate enough to take a vacation to Washington State, where I visited my family's house in the San Juan Islands. The woman who lived there before us designed and made these beautiful stained glass windows on the interior front door and windows.
I noticed for the first time that in addition to clouds, there are also mountains, like on an adjoining island as well as the Olympics mountain range.
One of the many perks of being at this home is there is no Internet access or mobile phone coverage. I brought my laptop to play with LightLogo and TurtleArt because they both run offline. I thought the stained glass window would make a great project to model in TurtleArt.
I started with clouds, since they would be behind and in front of the sun. Like other procedures, this one has a bit of randomness built into the design.
The sun was positioned in the upper left corner of the screen.
Next, the rays. I wanted to capture a bit of the light through glass effect, so I used the shade block to adjust the shade as the rays are drawn. Medium and small rays look to the X and Y coordinates of the large ray to try to get them somewhat adjacent to one another, like the glass version.
The mountains' design vexed me for a day until I thought about squares rotated 45 degrees. Voilà!
The waves were a copy of the mountains design with smaller boxes.
The master procedure, glass, combines the subprocedures and moves the turtle on the screen. I split the master procedure blocks in two after the green setxy block in the stack. The procedure continues and is typically connected at the repeat block.
Here is the "glass" procedure, which draws all the parts as well as three seagulls.
I appreciate that each time it runs the rays, clouds, mountains, and sea look slightly different.
I also had to remove a number of wasps nests around the exterior of the house. The vinyl flooring in the bathroom also had a hexagon pattern.
This was a fun model to create. While experimenting, I made the pattern overlap, which my mother said looked like a tumbling block quilt pattern. I will have to revisit that design later!
My ultimate TurtleArt vacation project will be a set of procedures that draws an image of my favorite place in the world. Here is a glimpse.
Next time you are on vacation, try using TurtleArt to make some memories of your own!
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