These look a little bit, to me, more like maybe fabric dye, or something like that, but you still keep all of these really cool, interesting watercolor-like textures in here. I also introduced a couple of decorative elements. Introduced some masks on the different layers of watercolor paint. That's where you see some the lighter lines, where it allows layers below it to show through.

But I want to talk just a little bit about how you put together full generative piece. It does resemble a lot how I modeled the watercolor process itself. There's a lot of carefully applied randomness in these. If I ran the program that generated this one a second time, I would get a pretty different result. That's by design.

It's a careful balancing act when you're working with randomness in generative artwork. You want those pleasant surprises that come from using randomness. You want it to do things that maybe you couldn't think of yourself, or that you didn't expect, or that are really off-the-wall. It's really amazing for that type of exploration.

But you don't want it to only do something pleasant every 2,000 images. You want it to do something pleasant every maybe 10 or 20 images. You try to find this system of constraints around the randomness, or this structure that makes it more likely to produce interesting things. Determining exactly what that structure is is different for every piece, and is usually the most challenging part of designing a piece of artwork. But it's what makes generative artwork a really fun way to work, for me.

Let me see how much time I've got here. Okay. This is pretty much everything that I have to say about the watercolor process, and about how I've applied it to a few pieces of artwork. Since we have some time, and people usually have no idea what generative artwork is about, I want to go ahead and open it up for questions. But before I do, thank you very much, everybody, for having me on! I appreciate it, thank you.

Audience Q & A

Q. Do you mostly work with static images in Processing, or do you utilize some that's more like animation, dynamic features in your works?

I do, occasionally, use animation, but so far, I've only focused on static imagery, because it's already such a new, difficult thing to do. Adding dimensions of time just complicates things infinitely. I mean, literally, you're adding an infinite dimension to the work. It's hard enough for me to make static 2-D imagery, and I feel like it will be a long time before I've mastered that in any sense. I do play with animation some, but for now, I'm focusing on what I can learn just through static, 2-D imagery.

Q. How do you save your work? Can we see some code?

I save my work through seeds for the random number generator. I think everybody in here probably knows what a seed is, so I won't explain that. But every time I update the program and re-run it, I use a new seed, and I save the seed as part of the filename. That way, if I want to generate a much larger image, I can just re-run the program with different size settings, and use the seed. That will mostly work. There are some gotchas there. But I won't go into detail on those. Other than that, I just save images as just TIFF images, which are nice for printing.

Can you see some code? You can see some code. On my website, which is nicely listed right there, I have blog posts. I specifically have a blog post about the watercolor approach, and it shows code in there. I don't opensource all of my work. That's a long topic that I won't get into here. But I'm happy to talk with anybody about that afterwards.

Q. Have you learned anything about water, and the sort of ways that water distorts things, and the physical processes by doing this type of study?

I did read a little bit about fluid dynamics, which fell into the realm of being too complicated for me. I talked about, I want it to be simple. I want to understand everything from the top to the bottom, and to do that with fluid dynamics would take me a really long time. I didn't care that much about having physically accurate simulation.

On the other hand, it taught me something about watercolor painting, the actual process of using watercolor paint. When you observe things with this very process-oriented mindset, this very analytical mindset, it's interesting. You learn a lot more in the reverse direction, as well. By doing this sort of generative work, my actual watercolor paintings have gotten a lot better, I think. I have learned a lot, but I can't say that I've learned too much about fluid dynamics.

Q. Have you looked at ink or pencil at all?

I have looked at both. There are some interesting textures and patterns that you get out of ink and pencil. Graininess. With ink, you get variations in the line thickness. But usually, what I study when I'm looking at ink and pencil is more about the imperfections in what happens when you draw something by hand. Or the way that, if you're trying to draw some pattern by hand, what's actually going on in your mind while you're doing that.

If you're trying to draw, say, a circle, over and over again with a pen, what are the rules that are actually going on in your mind about how you correct the pen to keep it close to the circle? Can you recreate that in a process? Can you capture that mixture of randomness and intent? I find that part of it a little bit more interesting than the specific textures of pen and pencil. But I would encourage you to investigate pen and pencil yourself.

Q. How long do your paintings take to render?

Anywhere from a tenth of a second to maybe one or two minutes, at the high end. That depends a lot on the polygon count, and the line count. The watercolor stuff is actually infuriatingly slow, because these polygons, they end up with a lot of edges. Especially this one, I think, was close to a minute. I don't like waiting quite that long for pieces to render. I try to keep things in the several seconds range, instead, if I can.

Q. When do you think your work will pass a Turing Test?

Yeah, I mean, translating the Turing Test to artwork is, I mean it is created by a human, right? So I hope I'm passing the Turing Test in that aspect. But I do very frequently have people think that I've done this work by hand. Maybe not as much with the watercolor, although people do say that. But especially with line drawings by hand.

Let me see if I can go back to, I think it was this one. Yeah. The image on the left, a lot of people, even looking at a really large print up close, they ask me, "How long did it take you to draw this by hand?" I told them, "I would be insane, if I tried to do this by hand." But that's what I love about trying to capture that human warmth in the work. That's what all that little, carefully placed randomness gives you, is that warm, natural feeling. Even though this is all triangles, ostensibly, it has a much more natural, warm feeling. People do mistake it for being drawn by hand pretty often.

Q. The normal distribution is awesome, and it's a good thing that you’re using it, but have you thought about using other distributions?

The only other one that I tend to use is, boy, you've put me on the spot. I'm blanking on the name of it.

Q: Can you describe it?

It's the one where almost all of your values are very close to-

Q. The Poisson distribution.

Yeah, like a Poisson distribution. Exactly. Yeah. Man, that's a great audience. Yeah. I did take a probability class in university, and I remember I loved it, and I remember there being a lot of cool distributions, but that and the triangle distribution has come in handy in a couple of places. But other than that, normal distribution works for me about 95% of the time.

Q. Who are some other artists that we can take a look at, if we're interested in seeing more generative art?

Boy, there's a lot of them. Probably the biggest name in generative artwork, and one of the authors of Processing is a gentleman by the name of Casey Reas. He's been pretty successful in the actual art world.

Hmm, some of my favorites. There's a gentleman in Australia named Jonathan McCabe, who does ... His work is on Flickr, primarily. But he uses a lot of cellular automata work that recreates a lot of interesting biological patterns. I would suggest looking at, there's actually a generative artwork subreddit that I'm a moderator on, r/generative. That actually has a really good sampling of lots of generative artists. If you want to see a good variety, that's one spot that's actually one of the better collections on the internet of generative artwork.

Q. I know it's probably hard to estimate, because you're reusing some of the textures and the mediums you make as libraries, but how long do you spend on actually creating one of these pieces? Start concept to finished product?

There's a lot of variation in that. My typical range is probably five to ten hours. Sometimes I get lucky, and something good comes out in one hour. Sometimes, it's a real grind, and I work on it for 20 or 30 hours. That's especially true if I'm doing something that's like a commission, where I'm working back and forth with a client on a piece.

But generative artwork is really interesting in that way, because sometimes these really elaborate, detailed pieces just come together really quickly, and it only takes a few lines of code. It's all over the place. Whereas with something like a painting, you have a much more predictable amount of time, I think, that you're going to spend on a piece. I love how fast I can work with generative artwork most of the time.

Q. Have you considered pairing audio synthesis with the visual aspect of generative artwork?

I've considered it, but for the same reason that I don't do animation, I don't do that. It makes it really difficult, and I'm not quite there yet. I also lose some of the control that I like. I like having the control that having a no-input program gives you.

Q. Have you thought about importing randomness from nature?

I have not. What's an example that you might think of? Now I'm curious.

Q. Like sampling a photograph as a source of randomness.

I have not thought about that. That might be an interesting way to get some really unique probability distributions, though. That's a cool idea.

Q. A related question: have you thought about providing your own randomness, like from say webcam, or some other input like a keyboard or a Wii-mote?

I've thought about it maybe just briefly, but there weren't any huge advantages that stuck out to me. I don't want to make things interactive just for the sake of making people feel like they've had a meaningful input. A lot of work that does that, it feels cheap to me. I'd rather that they had just made something cool, without me waving a thing around. That's how I feel.

Q. Do you algorithmically generate all of your assets, and shapes, and all that? Or do you import SVGs, and use things like that to create them?

The answer is that I algorithmically generate, in almost all of my pieces, 100% of it. I don't import any geometric shapes. The closest thing that I can think of is, occasionally I will integrate hand-drawn elements. Digital painting elements. If I want to do something like a generative portrait, then I will integrate hand-drawn elements in it in various ways.

Q. Have you experimented with working in 3-D for projecting it back into 2-D?

Any time you look at a 3-D image on your screen, it is naturally projected back into 2-D. I'm not sure about that part of it, but-

Q. Do you do all of your computation in 2-D?

Yeah. I do all of my computations in 2-D. I don't do any three-dimensional geometry, or perspective, or anything like that. Sometimes I allude to three-dimensional elements, like this one on the right, you might perceive some depth there. But no, all of my math is basically two-dimensional.

Q. Do you tend to have a specific concept of what you’ll make before you start, or do you take shorter iterations, and get feedback of where it's moving?

The answer is that most often, I'm working very iteratively, and it's very exploratory. That's one of the strengths of the medium, is that it's so mutable. You don't have to figure out everything upfront.

Any painter will tell you, even if you try to plan out a whole painting, and you do studies and sketches, when you go to paint the final painting, things don't work out, and you have to adjust things on the fly. It's already difficult to plan things out perfectly. So I find that I make the best work when I know very little upfront about what I'm going to do, and I just try to be open to see new things come out of the artwork.

Time for one more question. Who has the better question? This guy looks pretty confident. I'll talk to you afterwards.

Q. If we purchase one of your works, do we get the source code, too?

Yes. That's a question I like. I knew I went with this guy for a reason. The question is, if you purchase one of my works, do you get the source code, too?

The answer is yes. I provide a printout of the source code to the works, along with the prints. All of my prints are single-edition works. I don't do multi-edition prints of anything.

Thanks, you all, very much for all the great questions. I really enjoyed it. Thank you.