Creative Coding Every Day: Genuary 2022
A collection of responses to generative art prompts
Every Spring for the past few years I’ve been teaching a course on Creative Coding for graphic designers. Planning for the course and supporting students typically involves a lot of learning and experimentation on my part. This year, to get myself into a creative work flow and stretch myself, I’m taking on the Genuary 2022 prompts from http://genuary.art/.
I am incredibly proud of the work I’ve created this month! I don’t love everything I’ve made, but each prompt has pushed me into a new creative area and helped me develop my skills. I hope to extend several of these pieces with more variations, documented code and tutorials, and art prints.
January 31: Negative space.
The final prompt! Infinite variations of the face/vase optical illusion.
January 30: Organic looking output using only rectangular shapes.
Random positioning of tiny squares based on tangents, building up over time.
January 29: Isometric perspective.
Floating isometric cubes in varying colors.
January 28: Self Portrait.
This one requires a camera so it won’t work embedded into the article! For my take on a self-portrait, I modified an existing “mirror” project I’d made to give it a crafty feeling, limiting the colors so each frame felt more realistic as a stitching pattern. Lately I’ve been using craft to give myself something other than a screen to focus on.
Try out the cross stitch mirror on openprocessing or in the p5.js web editor and allow your camera to operate it.
January 27: #2E294E #541388 #F1E9DA #FFD400 #D90368.
Five set hex colors make dotted-line arcs around a center. They make dense circular forms.
January 26: Airport Carpet.
Simple “carpet tile” pattern design with shifting stripes in purple, blue, and green.
January 25: Perspective.
Playing with the idea of reflected, symmetrical, and layered 2-point perspective lines.
January 24: Create your own pseudo-random number generator and visually check the results.
A visualized random number between 1 and 200. The background pattern indicates the square root of the number. For instance, the visual for 16 includes a grid of 4x4 ellipses. If the square root is not a whole number, the remainder is shown as stars and smiles. As the number increases, the hue of the sketch increases. You can tap to generate a new random number!
January 23: Abstract Vegetation.
Generative geometric floral pattern.
January 22: Make something that will look completely different in a year.
Playing around with time-based inputs to make an abstract calendar/clock. In even years, it will involve rectangles and lines. In odd years, it will be circular.
January 21: Combine two (or more) of your pieces from previous days to make a new piece.
I ended up putting together two variations! I took the line art from 1/7 and combined it with the rotation in space of 1/16 and the color palette from 1/12. The first variation involves small, repeating “sticky notes” flying off in space. The second variation goes big to resemble standing inside a loom.
January 20: Make a sea of shapes.
Repeating “waves” of shapes overlap over time with different blending modes.
January 19: Use text/typography.
A simple interactive tool to generate swirling typographic images. If you want to try it out full-screen you can also access this version hosted on the p5.js web editor.
January 18: VHS.
Inspired by reels of VHS tape, super-tight spirals spin around to produce a subtle glitchy effect.
January 17: 3 colors.
Variations using green, pink, and cream Mid-Century forms.
January 16: Color gradients gone wrong.
I love how these turned out! Each composition is a series of overlapping gradients between 2 colors, but the gradients are randomly shifted ever-so-slightly in 3-dimensional space to make ethereal, glitchy compositions. Sometimes the previous composition peaks through. to add a pop of another color.
January 15: Sand.
Points inside a for loop, rotating and building up over time.
January 14: Something you’d never make.
I present to you… Overnight Salad. It’s not easy to make, lots of ingredients it takes, but it’s worth it to serve my overnight salad.
January 13: 800x80.
Random letters of the alphabet laid out in a #800x80 canvas.
January 12: Packing (squares, circles, any shape…)
Retro flower pattern built on top of the code the Coding Train’s Animated Circle Packing Coding Challenge.
January 11: No computer.
Similar to randomly placed ellipses on a digital canvas, here are “random” paper circles on felt:
January 10: Machine Learning. Wrong answers only.
I‘ve seen some pretty bad logo generators that claim to be “AI-powered” when they just slap together random combinations based on a few starter terms. So I made my own terrible fake logo generator using perchance.org! It combines icons from Font Awesome with a few Google Fonts, randomly-generated hex colors, and lists of nouns or company names. Try it out yourself to see the funny results of using “Machine Learning” to create logos.
January 9: Architecture.
Generative illustration of row homes, inspired by the architecture in Philadelphia and my colleague’s phillyrow.com project.
January 8: Single curve only.
A single bezier curve rotating in 3D space.
January 7: Sol LeWitt drawing.
Dense, slightly irregular lines in a grid, inspired by the work of Sol LeWitt.
January 6: Trade styles with a friend.
Time for a style transfer! I used RunwayML to do AI style transfers using models trained on work by Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, and Vincent van Gogh.
Here I’ve run the models on work I made January 4th:
Here I’ve run the models on artwork my toddler made in Procreate:
For reference, here is the original toddler art:
January 5: Destroy a square.
Move your mouse up and down to change the stroke width, move it left to right to change the rotation of the layered squares.
January 4: The next next Fidenza.
This is far from Tyler Hobbs’ Fidenza, but adjusting the simple parameters here in the </> tab will create endlessly variable designs.
January 3: Space.
January 2: Dithering.
See it live: https://editor.p5js.org/Jennybkowalski/full/q2tAy2XVz
January 1: Draw 10,000 of something.
See it live: https://editor.p5js.org/Jennybkowalski/full/VtmRkmjpY
