Chapter 3. Draw

At first, drawing on a computer screen is like working on graph paper. It starts as a careful technical procedure, but as new concepts are introduced, drawing simple shapes with software expands into animation and interaction. Before we make this jump, we need to start at the beginning.

A computer screen is a grid of light elements called pixels. Each pixel has a position within the grid defined by coordinates. In Processing, the x-coordinate is the distance from the left edge of the Display Window and the y-coordinate is the distance from the top edge. We write coordinates of a pixel like this: (x, y). So, if the screen is 200×200 pixels, the upper-left is (0, 0), the center is at (100, 100), and the lower-right is (199, 199). ...

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