Post #52756 by hanford_lemoore on Thu, Sep 25, 2003 11:24 PM

Thanks for the comments, everyone.

I thought I’d try a little experiment in the new Creating Tiki forum.

My painting is actually a test image made by a program I wrote. It took it less than 5 minutes to generate the image from scratch, using several sources as input (including photos of a 3 foot tiki from my living room). So, I’m afraid the media is “electronic” and the dimensions are 600 x 800 pixels. I forced the routine to make certain decisions while painting in order to test out other aspects of the code I’m working on.

I’ve been experimenting with routines like this for almost ten years now. The routines are all designed to create images from scratch, with variations. The program generates images nonstop, and I have in the past let it churn for hours (or days) and generate hundreds of new works of art based on the rules I’ve written. This particular routine creates brush strokes.

In other words, I’m a nerd.

One more note on this … the real art to this is watching it be painted from a blank canvas (which of course I have no way to show off here). It can be mesmerizing to watch a brand new painting develop from scratch on-screen, and I write these programs with the painting process in mind as much as the final result. Although it’s generated by a computer, I still consider it my art. I’ve built a piece of art that in turn builds new pieces of art.

~Hanford