GoKawiilI’ve been making generative art on and off since 2016. It started as a programming exercise and slowly turned into something more personal as I discovered I can actually express myself visually with it and feel as if I’m producing art. I have about 114 sketches in my p5js account at this point, and they document part of a journey that I want to try and put into words.
The short version is: every algorithm I learn becomes a tool I can reach for later, and over time those tools have accumulated into something like a vocabulary. I learned about textures, layering, about colors and positioning through experimentation and creating hundreds of sketches over the years, in P5.js and other media. The longer version is what follows.
The beginning: what does this math look like?
My earliest surviving sketch is a phyllotaxis spiral. If you don’t know what that is, it’s the pattern you see in sunflower heads and pine cones: you place points along a spiral using the golden angle, and something surprisingly natural and organic appears. The code is about 30 lines and mostly consists of cos() , sin() , and sqrt() , decidedly inorganic.
Fig. 1: An early phyllotaxis spiral, circa 2016.
I remember being genuinely amazed that such a simple formula could produce something that felt real. And that was more or less the whole creative process at the time: find an algorithm, tweak parameters until it looks nice, save it, move on. I’d learn about these algorithms from other nerds on the web. The aesthetic decisions were all second to the math. I didn’t choose this shape or that texture, I chose a formula, and whatever came out was what I got. I also didn’t know how to introduce variance.
Most of my early work looks like this. Mathematical structures rendered in bright colors or white on a black background. There’s a certain beauty to them, but they feel more like illustrations of concepts than things I made. I was a programmer first, an artist second if at all.
Learning to see texture
At some point—I couldn’t tell you exactly when—I started getting bored with the clean mathematical look, and I felt guilty for just stealing formulas other people were using with some variation. I wanted things that felt more physical, more like they had been made by a hand rather than a machine.
This is when I started paying attention to texture. I began simulating brush strokes, experimenting with particle systems to create the impression of fur or hair, varying line weight and opacity to mimic the way ink bleeds into paper. Flow fields became a frequent starting point, not because the math was new to me, but because they created versatile, beautiful textures.
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