Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been carving out a little more time for my own experimental work. Something I’ve been wanting to delve further into was dynamic abstraction. An art form made popular by the artist Joshua Davis. My platform of choice is of course Flash, and the reasons are obvious for anyone who knows me.
Now that I’m delving further into this, I’ve begun to create artwork that I would like to keep. My challenge was that I wanted to preserve the vector nature of the artwork instead of resorting to saving the work out at a bitmap. I researched the idea of using ActionScript to write out the EPS instructions to a text file so I could then change the extension to “.eps” and open it in Illustrator. After a few minutes I realized that I was overcomplicating the process. Moving from the dynamic artwork created in my SWF file to EPS is actually very easy to do.
Once the SWF file runs and generates the artwork that I was to export I can simply select “Print…” from my Flash Player menu, and select to print it out as a PDF file. This is something that you can do natively on my MacBook Pro. From here I just open the file up in Illustrator and I’m set. I have a complex rendering perfectly preserved with all its complexities in vector format. It’s a pretty low-brow process, but hey, it works perfectly for what I want to do.
I’m sure plenty of folks have already figured this out as a viable process, but I thought I’d share my approach here just in case there are others out there like me that can find themselves looking for an unnecessarily complex solution. Sometimes the answer is just sitting right there in front of you.