A Process for Making Generative Art

I like to make images that fall somewhere between collage, generative art, and algorithmic art. My generative artistic process usually begins with either a photograph I have made, or an image from the public domain. Some favorite places to search for public domain images incude Flickr Commons, the vast collection of public domain images from the Metropolitan Museum of art, and also the Walters Art Gallery.

A Collection of Image from Flickr’s “The Commons.”

I then begin a collaborative process between me, my device (in this case a 12.9 inch iPad Pro), and series of Photo-editing apps.

After the images are arranged or combined in Procreate, I start generating new images, often with an app called decim8. I sometimes use an app called PicsArt for interesting filters, and then I go back to Procreate for further layering and collaging. I also use Brushstroke, which uses algorithmic filters to make an image look painterly.

The iterations of the generative art process

Is it purely algorithmic? Yes, because I always feed an image into decim8, which uses algorithmically generated filters. No, because I produce numerous iterations, and it takes my human eye to determine what is aesthetically pleasing. To take it to the next level, It would be interesting to use an app like decim8 and train it to randomly produce something that is aesthetically pleasing.


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