I encourage you to look at these these prompts as starting points for your visual explorations with code. They are crafted to be open-ended enough that they allow for plenty of room to explore within the given constraints, but they shouldn't feel prescriptive. There are no right or wrong answers 🙂 Make the most out of them, based on your level of experience and your needs with regards to this class.
There are seven prompts this week, and that will be the case for each week of our class. The idea behind them is for you to practice creative coding daily, as a way of building a habit, becoming more comfortable with the tools we use, and developing ideas. Try to spend less than an hour every day creating something for the daily prompt – it can be the first thing you do in the morning, your afternoon break activity, or the last thing you do before going to bed. Scheduling consistency across multiple days tends to help in building a habit.
It's totally fine (and actually encouraged) to develop a sketch over a few days. Starting from scratch every day can feel exhausting, so feel free to take the previous day's sketch as a starting point, and see where you can take it. In my practice, I tend to work with the same sketch for 3-8 days, until I run out of ideas. When things are starting to feel stale, I enjoy stepping away from my computer, drawing some ideas in my notebook, and then opening a new file in my code editor and starting from scratch. Of course, this is particular to my process. Every one has a different rhythm and way of working, this is just one way of doing things.
Of course, I encourage you to keep up with the daily practice, but completely understand that this class likely exists in your schedule on top of a job, a social life, a list of exciting hobbies and plenty of responsibilities.
If you want to talk through any of the prompts or your general approach, I'm always available via email ([email protected],) and happy to schedule time to talk in person.
For this week's prompts, I encourage you to get more comfortable with randomness and grids, and to venture into circles and curves if you feel comfortable!
How can you illustrate the idea of motion in a still composition? Can you do it with 2 elements? What about 20? Or 2000?
A for inside of a for inside of a for (inside of a for?). *Prompt Credit: Piter Pasma & Genuary 2021*
And no grids, if you feel up for it.
Is it today's temperature that makes an appearance in your random walk? Is it the time, like Magdalena proposed in class? Or maybe this composition is a random walk performed by yourself, instead of `createPath`? Or your hand on paper, doing a [blind contour](<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_contour_drawing>)?
Are they full circles or arcs? Are they smooth or noisy? Bonus points if you use your two favorite colors for background and foreground 🙂