Veit's Blog

I Can't Paint

3/18/2017

I'm not very good with a paintbrush, so I made a bot that paints for me. It's called shinupaint and updates every 10 minutes while I'm online. It's still a little buggy, but it produces relatively pretty results. You can find the source code on Github.

Fig. 1: One of my favorites thus far.

A bit of background: shinupaint (or 死ぬ, which is Japanese for "to die") started out with me fiddling around with snek, a system for producing generative art in Common Lisp. The project is in its infancy and there is little documentation, so I took one of the examples and started from there. It is still very much inspired by the original product, made by the infallible inconvergent.

Fig. 2: gen-lines, as performed by inconvergent.

I quite enjoyed playing around with snek and hope to find my way back into the generative art world. I've always just dabbled and never really deeply understood what I was doing, but it's always been tremendous fun.

I hope you enjoy the paintings as much as I do. See you soon!