Art & Music - Module 3: Creating Colorful Patterns (Spring 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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My artwork is inspired by the Jackson Pollock paintings that we saw in class. However, I wanted to base my colors off a more bright and vibrant color palette compared to the darker colors in Pollock’s paintings. Building off the procedures we did in class, I layered different patterns of colorful and slightly transparent dots, squiggly lines, and confetti to create a similar effect that Pollock’s paintings do.

3

Here is my assignment: Week_3_Pollock by penguinoh | Snap! Build Your Own Blocks

My goal here was to use the randomization tool to make lines of various lengths and pen sizes to appear across a black background. I also made the color choice very bright, because I feel it contrasts well with a black background.

Edit: I changed the final step to include squiggly lines with more transparent colors. I want to try and figure out how to only have the lines appear in a fixed location, so they are only in the center of the screen.

4

My artwork is inspired by some of the Jackson Pollock art that we saw in class, however I wanted to have some kind of visual representation in it. In my art, I have each quadrant representing an element (fire, water, earth, air), and so used the color palette to represent that. Additionally, I then used layering of dots and lines to replicate the Pollock style.

5

I saw someone use a cool trail technique in one of the example programs. I tried to use a similar effect by repeatedly drawing trails and small semi-circles (swirls) of random color. I like how it turned out and feels Pollock-esque.

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That is such a cool effect to create 4 quadrants representing an element, very unique! I don’t really have much you could improve on, maybe you could warp the whole thing so it comes out all at once, but very nice job.

7

I started with spreading out a bunch of black circles because I was going for a dark theme. From there, I thought of adding splashes of “confetti” in different colors. I had a blue piñata in my mind as I chose the different colors. At the end, I wanted to experiment with the ghost effect and decided to stamp splashes of red on top with a different shape and vibe. Overall, I was going for a dark color contrast with light spots.

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I like the color contrast a lot! It’s giving a very paintball vibe and it’s really appealing. In your code, there are a lot of lines in the “when Green Flag clicked”, so I would say shorten that to make it flow simpler!

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https://snap.berkeley.edu/snap/snap.html#present:Username=ilirong99&ProjectName=week%203%20assignment

I tried to use random pen sizes without lifting the pen to create the uneven paint splatter effect of Pollock and Krasner’s lines. I picked a triadic colour palette with shade variations to invoke a sense of action and excitement.

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It’s so cool to see each layer being laid by the pen. The end result becomes almost palimpsestic of the process which feels very Pollock. In the block definition, I would maybe change “amount” input name to show that it represents the number of layers, to avoid it getting confusing as you read the code.

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https://snap.berkeley.edu/snap/snap.html#present:Username=camxhou&ProjectName=module%203

My artwork is partly inspired by the Jackson Pollock paintings we saw in class, but I wanted to play a bit more with circles and create something that resembles night life. I think for future edits, I’d add more layers of arcs to recreate the lights at night.

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This is so cool!! I really like how you did the paint splatter effect! I think you could probably abstract your code a bit, but otherwise I don’t have any feedback.

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https://snap.berkeley.edu/snap/snap.html#present:Username=idlelicense8236&ProjectName=week%203%20assignment

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This project generates colorful abstract patterns using randomness and motion. I was inspired by the action painting style of Jackson Pollock, where movement, energy, and unpredictability are central to the artwork.

The sprite moves randomly across the canvas while drawing with the pen, continuously changing direction, color, and line thickness. Because the values are randomized, each run of the program produces a unique composition. I also constrained the motion to the visible stage so the artwork remains contained within the canvas. This shows how simple rules and randomness in code can be used to create expressive, painterly visuals similar to abstract expressionist art.

14

Wow this is so cool. I love the spread in different colors. It invokes a sense of nostalgia for me, really interesting!

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https://snap.berkeley.edu/snap/snap.html#present:Username=artiehumphreys&ProjectName=Drip%20Painting
I was really interested in the randomness of Pollock’s paintings so I tried my best to make a procedure that completely randomized painting creation. I added a new block that acts as a random walker to creates some unique patterns that aren’t just a straight line. I had a lot of fun with this project and messing with randomness a little bit.

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I worked off what we did in class with the sprinkle-like design and wanted to make the shapes look a bit more like splatters, so I edited the line block to increase the pen size as it moved. I went for a selection of pastel colors for my palette, starting with a light purple and experimenting with different colors to see which looked pleasing together. I also decided to experiment with changing the saturation of the drips to add more visual depth.

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https://snap.berkeley.edu/snap/snap.html#present:Username=joeressler&ProjectName=Module%203

I decided to do a similar design to what we learned in class. I started with a greyscale design featuring circles of different sizes and confetti of the same size. On top of this foundation, I decided to add a random line design of bright red to provide an interesting contrast to the greyscale design. Upon exploring other designs in class on Wednesday, I will look to add some more unique features to increase the complexity of my design.

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I wanted to have a cool toned splatter that kind of looked like lots of gum on a sidewalk. I used hues from 40 - 75 in increments of 5, and used a full range of brightness and 1 to 70 of saturation for the lines . I did 70 - 100 for the hue and a similar pattern for brightness and saturation for the dots. I didn’t want all the dots to be on top of all the lines, so I did a layer of lines and then a layer of dots and repeated that 50 times. I also had the length of the lines and the size of the dots be random.

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For my project I applied the techniques we learned in class and added an element of random change to the pen size every step, which I think helped the lines look more like paint splatters. I chose a purple and blue color scheme based off of randomly selecting one of four hues. I might add some variation to the saturation and value for the final version.

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https://snap.berkeley.edu/snap/snap.html#present:Username=zixingyu&ProjectName=hw3

I used what we learned in class with dots and lines to create layered patterns. By gradually changing the pen size while drawing lines, I was able to form raindrop-shaped strokes and create the effect of rain falling onto grass.