Art & Music - Module 3: Creating Colorful Patterns (Fall 2026)

For Teachers
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“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:

Art, Animations & Music

This week’s module is titled “Creating Colorful Patterns”. In it, we will continue to explore the works of American abstract impressionist painters, focusing specifically on Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner.

Pollock

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Figure 1:
Jackson Pollock working on his painting “One” while Lee Krasner watches

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Figure 2:
“One”, by Jackson Pollock. On Display at the National Gallery of Art - East Wing

The style of painting developed by this pair, dubbed “action painting” or “all-over painting” challenged the idea of what constitutes art by focusing more on the process of creating art than on the physical product itself. Below are two links to help you better understand the works of this revolutionary duo.

New Orleans Museum of Art (8 min)

The Westport Library (65 min)

The assignment for this week is to create a work of art inspired by the paintings these two artists. The program that you write should use constrained randomness to determine color palettes, sprite motion, pen size, and/or other elements of the code used to create the final product.

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.

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With this project I wanted to play around with different shapes layered over each other. I also wanted to include the full color spectrum because I thought the way the grays meshed with the brighter colors had a neat interplay. Something I want to try improving is to try and add different textures and updating the opacity. Additionally, I may try to adapt the paint brush texture shown in class.

I was not inspired by a particular painting, I was curious what a more predictable version of an ink splatter painting would look like. Additionally most examples I’ve seen include either muted colors or bright colors. I wanted to try and include both.

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I was interested in creating some sort of quadrant thing with random colors being generated every time. Some things I need to improve are fixing the length of some of my code blocks and populating the canvas more/adding more to it. I originally wanted to have each quadrant be it’s own design, but I decided to maybe not add that feature(though I might).

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I tried to create the stars of the night sky, and beyond that, the stars of the universe, using Pollock’s idea of letting randomness cover the whole canvas. I built a palette of starlight colors from different parts of the spectrum (yellow, gold, aqua, cyan, violet), then repeated 500 times: jump to a random spot, pick a random hue from the palette, and draw a Dot of random size 1 to 7 on a navy background. With more time I would have added a Milky Way band and a moon, which I plan to include in my update.

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I got my idea from those color blindness tests where they would have various patterns made by dots, except I made the pattern randomly generate based on colors of my choice. It took some time to figure out how to make the dots of various sizes generate without overlapping. I even made the code parameters editable, it is really fun to see the randomly generated patterns each time.

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For this project seeing that it involved a lot of randomness and also variety of colors, I thought of the way that balls made out of rubber bands look when seen up close. Thats what I wanted to go for with this project and I honestly think it came out looking quite well. Not only are there other colors, there are also bands of different widths do I think it implements the designs we talked about in class well. Although my design right now does resemble a ball made of rubber bands, I might think of other ideas I can make because I do think this unit has a lot of possibility.

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With this project, I wanted to put my own twist on some of the random arcs we looked at in class and see if I could make something that really replicates the beauty of paint splatter. Some of the splatter takes place within a contained space, while other splatters are spread throughout the background and across the canvas. This gives it the effect of randomness, but still controlled randomness, like we were talking about in class. I messed around with different hues until I found colors that I liked, and overall I really enjoyed making this piece.

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*Please use turbo mode when viewing*

Edits: I decided to make sure to fill up as much of the white space as I could and I think that made the piece fully come together. I really like how each third has a different pattern but they all play with colors.

This week I took inspiration from the quadrants example we saw in class and thought it would be cool to play with the stage in thirds and so thats what I did. In each third of the stage, I wanted to have a different but still colorful pattern. The upper third I tried to make a similar shape as the Nike swoosh and play with color alongside it. The middle third I tried to play with randomness in line sizes. And for the bottom third I used polka dots similar to what we saw in class.

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Snap! Scribble Balls

I had the idea of creating random scribble balls as an abstract form of art. I randomized the size, density, and color of the scribble balls. I tried to make the randomness aspect of it align with Pollock and Krasner’s style. On further thought, I could have done something with the edges since the randomness tends to focus away from the edges.

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My project, “Color Confetti,” is an original piece inspired by Pollock and Krasner. It uses random colors, sizes, and positions to scatter confetti across a dark background. I added more pieces to fill the canvas, and each run creates a different pattern.

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In my art, I wanted to experiment with the randomness of Pollock’s style while also incorporating some geometry and constraints. Rather than using more organic paint splatters, I chose to randomly scatter triangles across the stage to create a stained glass-like effect similar to what Professor Bull mentioned in class. I also constrained the placement of the triangles; rather than placing them across the entire stage I chose to generate them in a diagonal streak across the stage to have randomness within constraints.

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For my artwork, I wanted to sort of emulate lanterns in the water/lanterns in the sky. I used the style of Pollock and Krasner to achieve the controlled randomness. I also wanted to experiment with different brush textures, but didn’t really get to it yet. Playing with the brightness of the colors was fun, it allowed me to observe how brighter colors really pop against darker colors. I really want to use a oil paintbrush effect for the water background, but I am unsure of how to achieve it.

Edit: To improve my code readability, I abstracted my code. Additionally, I took the tips in class about how to create a paintbrush and applied it to my arcs with an oil paintbrush costume. While it doesn’t exactly look how I wanted it to, I think it creates a nice contrast in the artwork.

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For my project, I wanted to implement a simple random walk simulator. While the algorithm itself is pretty simple, I had to make 3 individual sprites so that it can be seen as 3 colors. Maybe for my next revision, I could try to make it work on a single sprite.

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For this week I want to use the costume skills we learned last week to play around with randomness in certain sections, and to focus on the color I want to see try using the ghost effect when I am stamping the costumes to get a range of color.

edit: I used a couple of different costumes and let the program randomly stamp. Some of the costumes were stamped and had the ghost effect others did not. I added a final big stamp in the center to leave a space that intentionally has a specific look.

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I wanted to create something that is abstract in a way, but also represents something. This is still a work in progress, as I am experimenting with randomness. It represents a black hole in a bright galaxy.

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I really like your rubber band idea! I think you used color and different widths effectively! Adding an off white or muted color background might help the brighter colors stand out even more!

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Edit

I really like how the bright lanterns stand out against the dark background. The random colors and placement make the artwork interesting while still keeping the lantern theme.

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I really like the bright triangles against the black background. The diagonal placement creates controlled randomness and gives it a cool stained-glass look. You could try adding a few warmer colors for more contrast.

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I really like how the random scribble balls look like paint splatters/a star. Maybe something that could look cool would be adding some sort of hue/opaqueness to the stars as well as a background for a contrast

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The concept for this is super cool! I love how you came up with something truly unique and creative while still sticking to the overarching theme of this week. The one suggestion I might add change the walking mechanism to point in a random directions walk a couple steps then wait and then loops. That way it feels more like walking then changing x and y. But other than that I genuinely enjoyed this project!