Raspberry on Printed Circuit Board:
My first piece of PCB art
Raspberry is no ordinary fruit, thanks to the marvelous little devices called Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi is a series of single-board computers, with no monitors and no hard drives. In eyes of a non-tech person like me, they are mainly pieces of small electrical circuit boards, and they have a splendid logo. (See their Instagram)
Hence, the fruit raspberry has a strong association with circuit boards, at least in my mind.
Printed Circuit Boards, or PCB, are not only vital parts for electronics, but also inspirations for artworks.
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| The photo I took a few years ago of an old dial-up modem. I'm still struck with the visual beauty of its circuit board. |
I've always wanted to do a design emulating PCB. For my first try, I decided to put a raspberry on it.
For this work, I have two major decisions to make: 1) which visual elements do I "borrow" from printed circuit boards? 2) how abstract or realistic do I draw my raspberry?
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| A more abstract representation of raspberry. |
There are all type of PCBs, with all sorts of colors and different levels of complexity. PCBs also keep evolving. For example on older PCBs the capacitors are cylinders extruding from the base while on newer ones they are just tiny blocks lying on the boards.
For my design, I want to keep the whole image simple, so I just integrated a few visual elements of PCB. I also stick with the color green since green is the conventional color associated with PCBs. As for the raspberry, after several attempts, I decided to put a very realistic fruit image on the chip instead of more abstract ones.
Here is my design of "Raspberry on Board", my first piece of PCB art.
"PCB Art" is a relatively new term. It has been used in two ways: 1, refers to art elements on actually functioning circuit boards, and 2, refers to artworks inspired by PCB, which have no functions other than being artworks. My design belongs to the later group of course.
As a graphic designer, my focus is always on the visual. I even look for inspiration from William Morris's fabric patterns. I shall call my design "PCB art, just art".