My Generative Art Process

THIS PAGE IS A PLACEHOLDER DRAFT!

The creative process

Picking themes

As a generative artwork, rather than designing each Color Orb individually, I wrote algorithm that makes hundreds or thousands of orbs around a particular theme at a time.

The beauty of the generative art process is in the joy of discovering a unique, rare artwork from the trillions of possibilities. You design the environment and constraints for them to exist in, but not the artwork itself. So when you find one that’s truly beautiful, it feels like a discovery rather than a creation.

I start with a theme to create orbs around. This might be a set of colors, a beautiful image or photo, a story (like the set of planets) or something more abstract like chaos. From there I’ll configure the bounds of the generative art algorithm to produce many orbs that fit within the theme. Finally I curate from the (often thousands) of orbs generated down to the final few that best represent the theme.

[images here showing color palettes or images used]

Curation

Deciding which orbs to keep and which to discard is often the hardest part of the whole artistic process. In many ways the curation step of generative art makes it feel a lot more like the process of selecting photos. There are a few different reasons I found myself selecting a planet to keep: