I recently made two space-themed posters, and I think they turned out pretty nicely! The first one that I made was honestly a bit of an accident. My initial goal was to create a sunflower, so I watched some YouTube videos on how spirals work, and I also read some code online to learn how they’re implemented as a program.

But as I played around with different spiral styles and backgrounds, I decided that it was better to go with this galaxy/wormhole poster instead.

• 

• 

I was really happy with how this poster came out, so I thought it would be fun to continue working on space art. A planet felt like a good next step, so I made this gas giant poster next. The planet itself is a circle with a gradient fill, and the rings are ellipses with a gradient stroke.

It’s a pretty simple illustration, but I think the fun part was implementing this in Lisp. I used Lisp instead of JavaScript this time because I wanted to try out this experimental image processing tool called Ronin. I don’t have much experience programming in Lisp, but it felt perfect for generative art. It didn’t look as verbose or as cryptic when compared to using the Canvas API directly. If I wanted to draw a star, I could simply write:

(fill
    (circle x y radius) "#DEE2E6")

Instead of:

context.fillStyle = "#DEE2E6";
context.beginPath();
context.arc(x, y, radius, 0, 2 * Math.PI, true);
context.fill();

There’s something fascinating about creating art by simply specifying a set of rules for the computer. There are so many possibilities! I’m hoping that I’ll continue exploring generative art for the years to come. I’ve been collecting my favorite works in https://jagtalon.com/generative-art/ as well so check that out from time to time if you’re interested!