“Creating Art & Music” is an introductory course designed to introduce creative activities in the context of art and music. Thus far the course has been taught at the middle school, high school, community college, and university level (with appropriate adaptations for each level). Each week, students in the course are posting their projects in this strand of the Snap! forum. Here’s a link to the course materials:
This week’s module is titled “Exploring Color”. In it, we will explore the works of color field painings created by abstract impressionist painters like Clyfford Still, Kenneth Noland, and perhaps most famously, Mark Rothko. We will also explore different methods for manipulating colors in snap using Color Filters.
The assignment for this week is to begin by creating color field painting using the pen and motion command blocks. Then, write a program that will procedurally generate that painting. Possible extensions include writing a program that will select variables from a list to randomize the appearance of the painting or creating color filters to create different versions of the same painting.
Save your program to the cloud, share it so that others will be able to access it, and then post the link as a reply in this strand.
Please provide contextual information for your project, letting us know whether you are replicating an existing painting or choosing to create an original work. If you are creating an original work, please let us know if any particular artists or works of arts have inspired your creation.
I started by figuring out how to make solid color blocks and turn them into costumes so they could be stamped. Once I felt comfortable with that technique, I experimented with a few different arrangements of these blocks to create a visually interesting piece. I started with simple stripes, then experimented with different thicknesses and placement. Rothko emphasizes using color to make the audience feel something, and I wanted my piece to create a feeling of playfulness or joy. To achieve this, I drew inspiration from my favorite children’s movie, Alice in Wonderland, and decided to use the colors of the Cheshire Cat and Alice’s dress as inspiration.
I learned how to use stamping to make both horizontal and vertical lines which is my base layer. I tried to make a circle on top of the other layers which I think turned out quite cool!
I followed the rectangle pattern we learned in class and just created different size rectangles at first. I made them all a different shade of blue because I liked how those shades looked together. From there, I tried to arrange the different blocks starting with the border. I experimented with turning them different ways and also learned how to use the stamp feature.
I took an unorthodox approach to generating rectangles, noticing that the polygons in the paintings tended to have rounded edges. To emulate this, I spent a lot of time creating a block that would formulaically accomplish this given a width, height, and rounding radius. I had some issue with costumes rotating after applying pen trails, but overall had a good experience working on this thus far. I would like more practice with stamping going forward. https://snap.berkeley.edu/snap/snap.html#present:Username=artiehumphreys&ProjectName=Rothko
Here is my revised project after incorporating the feedback and inspiration I got from class. After seeing some of my classmate’s works, I wanted to incorporate some similar things, specifically having my code automate where each block is placed, as well as having a bit more of a representative style. Additionally, I wanted to give my art a bit of depth, and so incorporated that in the blocks. Finally, I took the feedback about naming the costumes and using programmed coordinates, and having the program be able to swap between costumes on its own and make uniformed spacings.
Original:
Here is my project! The idea for this was to kind of emulate the idea of a portrait holding a bunch of smaller portraits within it, and so I did that by having progressively smaller rectangles stamped on the center. The rectangles were created similarly to how we did in class, using a flat line of varying lengths and widths. From there I rearranged the colors to give it depth.
For this Rothko design, I wanted to make a scene that had more of an aquatic feeling. For this, I decided to use exclusively blue/green blocks, as well as a light blue background, to represent water. Once I got an idea of the kind of scenery I wanted to create, I generated my blocks using various movement commands to generate blocks of differing width and height. From there, I manually placed the costumes and stamped them to get an idea of the design I want to automate, which I have yet to implement.
My idea behind this artwork was building upon the rectangular designs we did in class. I used different colors of more neutral shades to create costumes for my sprite. Then, having different sizes of rectangles and squares, I stamped different designs across the page. I tried creating a pretty abstract piece, similar to the idea behind Rothko paintings, but put my own spin on things by overlaying different shapes and colors on top of one another.
I edited my piece by abstracting the drawing into procedures and subprocedures. This created a program that will automate my drawing.
I set out to create a pattern using interesting colors in my apartment, including from a blue and white rug, a yellow chair, and a green lamp. I first added some squares underlined with thin rectangles, as seen in many Rothko works, and arranged them in an interesting pattern. Then I added a smaller white pattern.
Revision:
When I revisited my project, my main focus was switching from a manual, arbitrarily stamped design to programmatic placement of blocks. I changed the background of my design to be a large blue block on a brownish gray background instead of just blue. I tweaked the size, arrangement, and color of my shapes and made sure they were being placed based on precise coordinates, which keeps the margins more consistent.
I changed my painting by changing the thickness of the 3 initial blocks to mimic Rothko’s work. Then I added intersecting white lines with shadows all over the painting to add dimension. I also changed the lines to have pointed corners instead of rounded ones, per my classmate’s suggestions.
Before: I used 4 procedures: initialize, draw first block, draw second block, and draw third block. I drew the different sections of my painting by navigating to the top left corner of the screen using the “go to x_ y_ “motion block and I found out how long the screen was by subtracting the x positions of the turtle at the front left corner and right corner. Then I put the pen down and drew for that amount and then lifted the pen back up. Then I turned the turtle using either the “rotate by __” block or the “point in _” block to create the next block. I will say my code feels very hard-coded, because it can only draw my specific painting. I tried to draw the second and third blocks in one procedure but I was really struggling to figure it out. I plan to add in variables to change the size of the blocks and possible make them staggered, like upside down stairs.
I used costumes and stamping to make the rectangles. My inspiration for this was to show off the beauty of the color gray, as lightening or darkening it gets you the contrasting colors white and black, respectively. I think I want to experiment more with the positioning of the rectangles, but I am open to feedback!
I really like this; it feels so 3D, and the color choice is great. As we discussed in class, to make drawing the circle at the end faster, you can use the warp block. Everything else is done very quickly, so that was just a little jarring.
My project was mostly experimenting with the costumes and how I could change their colors to match the background. I stamped the costumes downward with variations in their ghosting to make each one look different. I’d like to play around with the ghosting effect more in the future.
Snap! Build Your Own Blocks I created some custom blocks to draw colored rectangles and black grid lines. The inspiration comes from Mondrian’s use of primary colors, thick black lines, and geometric balance. I tried to recreate his Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow.
I really like the design, the combination of the different shades of blue makes it eye popping. You did well by using different costumes for the rectangles which makes the code easy to follow along with. Also the symmetry in the piece is great!
I thought your design was very cool and I liked how almost gave an illusion of depth and looking through a hallway. It reminded me paintings I’ve seen with nested boxes inside one another, which gave a similar illusionary effect. I think one thing that could help make your piece better is using some of the motion functionality “change x or y by _” so that all your boxes are equally spaced apart from one another.
This is a really cool program, and I love how the colors are random, yet have the same theme throughout the piece. I personally tried to recreate something similar, trying to get snap to be able to use the same theme throughout a piece, but I wasn’t able to figure it out, so kudos on you! I think my only piece of feedback would be to name the blocks something a little more meaningful so that another user outside of our class would be able to understand what the code chunks do.
I wanted to explore a design with odd polygons. I felt like the colors of faded blue lent itself well to the large shapes which I generated, and I am very happy with the thematic I’ve been able to create. I used an iterative approach to generate each polygon, stopping once there were four polygons on the screen.
I really enjoy the color palette that you used here and think that you took a unique approach by incorporating both vertical and horizontal bars in your design. I think that using different sized rectangles throughout would add some nice variation and overall create a unique color experience that isn’t simply repeating shapes. Overall, nice job with your project!
Hi Artie! I really liked your creative and unorthodox approach to rectangle generation. I’ll try to implement something similar in my next project. The colors also remind me of a popsicle on a summer day.
I wonder how it would change if you used hard edges/corners for the shapes.
