I’ve been using canvas-sketch ever since I started learning generative art back in November. It’s an incredibly useful tool for creating a new project, setting up a local server, and saving my artwork to disk. The only issue that I have with it is that it comes with a lot of dependencies that I don’t think are necessary for the kind of art that I do.

So I thought that I could take a stab at creating a minimal generative art template that only includes the things that I need. This is is how it works:

It’s not a zero-dependency template, but as long as you have CoffeeScript and Browsersync installed, you should be good to go. To start a new project, all you need to do is:

1. Download or clone the template.
2. Run ./build.sh (runs the CoffeeScript compiler)
3. Run ./server.sh (runs the Browsersync server)

And you’re good to go! The two most important files in it are index.html and art.coffee:

• 💻 index.html is a barebones HTML file that lets me view and save the artwork. It has a little bit of CSS that makes the Canvas responsive (I often work with large 3600×5400 images!) and a little bit of JavaScript that lets me download the art.

• 🎨 art.coffee is where I draw. It’s written in CoffeeScript, and it’s compiled to JS. I’m using it as a JavaScript module so that I can easily import libraries that are both local (like my little Canvas API wrapper called tiny-canvas.coffee) and remote (like NPM modules on Skypack).

And that’s it! build.sh and server.sh are set up to watch the files for any changes, so there’s no reloading involved once these two are running.

Of course, I could get really lean by removing the dependency on CoffeeScript, but I personally enjoy working with this language so I decided to include it. If you’re interested in tweaking the setup, feel free to fork the project and modify the template to your needs! You can find the repository on Sourcehut.