Art & Music - Module 3: Creating Colorful Patterns

"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 this fall, 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.

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

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.

Hi here is my week 3 project draft incorporating dots to create a colorful pattern. I was thinking ahead to the impressionist painters and wanted my dot pattern to resemble water and its movement. I created the random dot pattern and then "clear" the screen with gliding white lines before creating a new blue random dot pattern. https://snap.berkeley.edu/embed?projectname=Week%203%20Colorful%20Patterns&username=meganlife&showTitle=true&showAuthor=true&editButton=true&pauseButton=true

Hi, this is my week 3 project. I liked the idea of dots creating shapes resembling droplets of water, and ended up liking it most when they were curved. I also made the colors range from a cyan/green to an indigo color just because I liked those best. Snap! Build Your Own Blocks

This is my week 3 project here. I was inspired by Alice and Wonderland, specifically the Cheshire Cat and wanted to play around with rounded shapes + curves.

Hi! Here is my week 3 colorful patterns project! I really liked the look of the paint splatter/dash someone used last year, so I tried to replicate that. I also really like the colors, it reminds me of fall. however, I feel like I could do something to make it a little more unique but I am not sure what to do yet.

https://snap.berkeley.edu/snap/snap.html#present:Username=abbymeckes&ProjectName=Colorful%20Patterns&editMode&noRun

This is my week 3 colorful patterns assignment. I decided to split the top and bottom halves and use different color ranges to emulate some sort of landscape vs sky. I decided to overlay small arcs/curved lines over the dot background in the opposite color range to emphasize the contrast. It can definitely be more complex and more than just random dots and lines but I like it so far.

https://snap.berkeley.edu/snap/snap.html#present:Username=ekim1211&ProjectName=Week%203%20assignment

Hi this is my assignment for week 3. I decided to have my dots vary in size and then to add some contrast I added black swirls to stand out from the dots.

I like the pattern of the circles "moving" like water droplets. This is so cool!

I really like the colors you used, and how you made it look like the colorful circles were in the background of the design compared to the black swirls! The swirl shapes were also really cool!

I like what you have! The sharp, thin lines contrast nicely with the rest of the rounded dots. One thing that might make things more visually unique could be to play around with some kind of a colored background? You could potentially play around with patterns that vary in transparency; it might provide an interesting background without fighting for attention with the rest of your work!

Here is my Week 3 Assignment; I'm experimenting with warm and cool colors for palettes as well as some varied blotches for a background. I don't have any inspiration in particular and am more or less so trying to just play around and see what might look nice!

Here is my Week 3 Assignment (Snap! Build Your Own Blocks)! I had a lot of fun doing this project. I wanted to kind of emulate a birthday celebration with confetti and sprinkles appearing on the screen and used bright warm colors by randomizing the saturation!

The use of white dots as sort of an "eraser" is so clever! The way you wrote and labeled your code is so easy to read! I'm definitely going to use the white dots as an eraser on another project because it makes the scene appear animated!!

I wanted to emulate the falling dots effect that Joe showed us in class but with the use of layers as well. Did a lot of experimenting and turned out to be a design I really liked. Snap! Build Your Own Blocks

This my week 3 project here. In my piece I wanted to emulate the more fluid, paint-flowing feeling that I got from Pollock's work. To achieve this I tried experimenting around with creating dots and arcs of random sizes and angles. I also experimented with a range of colors and transparencies.

Hi, this is my week 3 project so far. I first started off with making polka dots of various sizes, but I wanted to add more, so I took inspiration from the Dots and Slashes sample project and added white slashes on top of my dots, repeating that process to make 5 layers.
https://snap.berkeley.edu/snap/snap.html#present:Username=dylanndo&ProjectName=Dylan%20Do%20Module%203

I like what you have so far! It's cool that you're creating layers of dots of varying color and descending size in a uniform order. It does seem like the last top layer isn't visible, so maybe you could cut your loop short one iteration. Good job!

Here is my week 3 project. I want to try to make it so the dots are all one hue (just varying shades of brightness/saturation) and same with the slashes.
https://snap.berkeley.edu/snap/snap.html#present:Username=lilymutzig&ProjectName=Week%203%20-%20Creating%20Colorful%20Patterns%20(Lily%20Mutzig)&editMode&noRun

Hello! I've made my own pattern, although it took a bit of a spin! I tried to create a fresh feel by mixing pastels with candy-like colors. The collection of dots I added at the end is a remix of something I saw in a retro pattern.

https://snap.berkeley.edu/snap/snap.html#present:Username=pts4kw&ProjectName=Module%203%20(KyungJung%20Kim)

I'm a fan of this design overall! The only thing I can really think of is that there may be an easier way to make the crescents. I personally used the arc function from the embroidery library from a previous week. I was able to make them random as well by pointing them in random directions.