The Drifting plug-in, a Dr. Woohoo experiment, forces the path to drift/slide as it chases the current location of the mouse or Leap Motion controller position and is insanely fun to play with. It’s based on a very simple concept where a particle is attracted to and chases a specific point, in this case the mouse or Leap Motion position. UI controls for the designer to tweak include:

Path:
• Simplify the number of points generated in a path
• In/decrease the acceleration of the particle
• In/decrease the friction applied to the acceleration and/or particle

Leap:
• Adjust how often the sample rate of the position of the Leap Motion controller is recorded

Illustrator:
• Select an existing Graphic Style
• Select a Blend Mode
• Fill (optional)
• Fill Opacity
• Stroke Opacity
• Stroke Width
• Use a regular or custom Art Brush

Non-destructive, Vector Paths
At the heart of each pencil, pen or brushstroke is a non-destructive, vector path/curve that lives first in the plug-in panel and then is drawn on the Artboard in Illustrator when the designer has finished playing/creating and clicks on the drawIt or brushIt button.

As a bonus, once the paths are created in Illustrator, all of the existing editing capabilities of paths within Illustrator remain, so that the paths can be edited at any point in time in the future. Future edits include scaling, rotating, re-positioning, adjusting the opacity, changing the colors of the fill and stroke, to a more micro-editing ability that lets the designer edit the multiple points and anchors along a path.

For this experiment, after creating the path in Illustrator, Woohoo integrated a custom art brush, blend mode, stroke color and opacity to create a more expressive and organic brushstroke via code. There is a huge amount of possibilities in this approach, even more so when Woohoo begins to get more abstract with how the paths are drawn in the next experiment.