This duotone art project is inspired by the stories coming out of Ukraine when they were first invaded. Being outside the conflict itself and wanting to help, my thinking was along the lines of, “How can I demonstrate my support for Ukraine and get involved?”

Well, creating an image filter seemed like a good way to do that.

I’ve been learning to _paint_ with p5, and was experimenting with pixel manipulation the weekend before the invasion. I haven’t really manipulated pixels outside of photoshop-like tools, and _painting_ with p5 has brought me a renewed sense of joy for programming. This is where the duotone idea of the filter came from, “Can I turn any image into the colors of the Ukraine flag and it still be recognizable?"

After a day or two of creating and polishing the duotone method with static images, it was looking pretty good. Made source images dynamic, and I could ship faster by not breaking out image processing into a separate service (as a bonus there’s privacy too). At this point, I do not want to think about having to manage all the I/O that comes with an image processing service. KISS, and see if people want/use it before putting in more effort there.

Dress it up, add in a few resources to help others get involved too, and that’s how we get this first version of ukrainespirit.art.