Unknown Pleasures Artwork Generator

Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures Album Art is perhaps one of the most iconnic album artworks out there. The 40th anniversary of Ian Curtis’ death was a couple of days ago so I decided to post this little script I’d written some time ago as a quick little exercise.

path = r"C:\Users\APOORV\Downloads\joy division.jpg"
picture = Image.open(path)
picture

This isn’t particularly hard but I like it all the same. We’ll be using the matplotlib, math, numpy and PIL libraries here. You know, bread and butter stuff.

import matplotlib.image as img 
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt 
import numpy as np
import math
from PIL import Image

Let’s use a generic butterfly image to play around with.

path = r"C:\Users\APOORV\Downloads\GettyImages-182457909-f1e4c7a.jpg"
picture = Image.open(path)
rad = np.asarray(picture)
rad = rad[:,:,0]
rad = 255*rad
picture

Next, we’ll construct an array taking pixel values from evenly spaced rows and dividing by 255 to convert the corresponding amplitude to be between 0 and 1. Play around with the value of t to change spacing of the rows.

sad = []
t = int(pow(math.sqrt(np.shape(rad)[0]), .65))
c = len(rad);
for i in range(len(rad)):
    if i%t==0:
        sad.append(rad[i]/255+c)
        c-=1
r = np.arange(0, len(sad[0]))
ax = plt.axes()
# Setting the background color
ax.set_facecolor("black")

for i in sad:
    plt.plot(r, i, 'white')

That’s basically it. I’ve been working on a few other artwork generators with a friend of mine, perhaps I’ll put up more if I feel like it. I’m on the look out for more of such artwork I could replicate. Let me know if you know of any!