Author: Batool Al Tameemi

This sketch went through more versions than I expected. What I’m submitting now is not where I started at all. The process was mostly about learning when to stop adding, when to remove, and when to trust small decisions like color and speed instead of big visual tricks.

Rather than drawing literal objects, I wanted to treat the canvas like a sky that slowly paints itself. The goal was to get something that feels alive and emotional through motion alone, without relying on obvious symbols.

Concept

The sketch is made up of many moving walkers that act like brush strokes. Each one follows a smooth flow field, creating large swirling currents across the canvas. Small warm dots are scattered in the space. They are intentionally subtle and not meant to be read as stars directly. Instead, they influence the motion by creating gentle swirling forces around them.

Movement is more important than form here. The drawing builds up slowly over time as strokes overlap, fade, and accumulate. I wanted the sketch to feel closer to painting than animation.

Inspiration

The main inspiration was The Starry Night by Van Gogh, but specifically the energy of the sky, not the imagery. I was drawn to how the sky feels restless, emotional, and alive. I wanted to translate that feeling into motion and color, without copying shapes or composition directly.

I was also thinking about painterly mark-making and how repetition and gesture can build texture and depth.

Milestones and process

This project was very much a trial-and-error process, and each milestone came from something not working visually.

Milestone 1: Realizing movement alone wasn’t enough
The first versions technically worked but looked bad. The motion was chaotic and noisy, and everything competed for attention. Even though there was a lot happening, nothing felt intentional. This was when I realized that having a system is not the same as having a composition.

Milestone 2: Struggling hard with color
Color was the longest and most frustrating part. Early versions were way too neon and saturated. They felt more like a screensaver than a painting. I kept tweaking values and nothing clicked until I made a decision to restrict the palette almost entirely to deep blues. Warm tones were allowed only in very small amounts. That shift changed everything. Once the palette was limited, the sketch finally started to feel grounded and cohesive.

Milestone 3: Changing how forces work
At first, I used direct attraction, which caused clustering and visual clutter. Everything kept collapsing into points. Switching to a tangential force that makes walkers swirl around dots instead of moving toward them was a turning point. This single change transformed the sketch from messy to controlled and gave the motion a calm, circular rhythm.

Milestone 4: Removing visual elements
This was a big one. I tried adding glowing stars, silhouettes, and other focal points, but they kept overpowering the motion. Removing them made the piece stronger. Each time I deleted something, the sketch improved. This taught me that generative work benefits a lot from editing and restraint.

Milestone 5: Slowing everything down
The final milestone was reducing speed and force. Earlier versions moved too fast and felt anxious. Slowing the walkers and letting the trails accumulate over time made the sketch feel more meditative and painterly. This is when it stopped feeling like an experiment and started feeling like an artwork.

Code highlight

This section of the code was crucial to reaching the final behavior. Instead of pulling walkers inward, it pushes them sideways so they orbit and swirl:

That small change completely reshaped the motion and helped the sketch feel intentional rather than chaotic.

Coded embedded 

Reflection and future work

This project taught me how important restraint is in generative art. The sketch became stronger every time I simplified it. Color, speed, and force mattered far more than adding new visual elements.

In the future, I want to explore:

• Using fewer walkers to increase negative space

• Creating print-focused versions with stronger contrast

• Letting the flow field change slowly over time to create different emotional phases

So far honestly I am so so proud of myself for creating this and I loved it

Reading Chapter 2 of The Nature of Code weirdly calmed me down. I think I usually approach motion by trying to make things feel dramatic or responsive, like faster equals better. This chapter made me slow down and realize that motion is not about speed at all. It is about pressure. Direction. Influence.

What really clicked for me is the idea that forces act on acceleration, not velocity. That sounds obvious when you read it, but in practice I was constantly breaking that rule. Every time I moved the mouse, I was basically telling the system to panic. Once I stopped doing that and forced the speed to stay constant, the sketch suddenly felt more confident. The rain did not need to prove anything. It just kept falling.

I also liked how the book is not obsessed with realism. It cares more about whether something feels believable. That gave me permission to simplify. My rain is not physically accurate, but it behaves consistently. Gravity always pulls down. Wind always pushes sideways. When the cursor leaves, the wind eases out instead of snapping back. That easing honestly made the biggest difference emotionally. It feels patient, not reactive.

Another thing that stuck with me is how small forces matter when they accumulate. I kept my wind values tiny because I was scared of it getting messy. But because they are applied every frame, they slowly shape the motion. That made me trust the system more instead of over-designing the interaction. I did not need big gestures. I needed persistence.

this chapter made me realize that personality in motion comes from constraints. By limiting speed and letting forces only steer, the rain feels stubborn in a quiet way. It does not rush when you touch it. It responds, but on its own terms. I think that is the first time I felt like I was designing behavior instead of just animation.

For future work, I want to play more with multiple forces at once without losing control. I am also interested in how constraints can be used intentionally to create mood, not just structure. This reading made me think less about showing off interaction and more about letting motion breathe.

reference video

For my movement-in-nature example, I focused on rain falling in wind. I like rain because it looks simple, but it is actually full of micro rules. It accelerates because of gravity, it gets pushed sideways by wind, and it never falls in a perfectly clean line. It feels alive even when nothing “exciting” happens.

My goal was to give the rain a personality through behavior only: steady, determined drops that do not freak out. Even when you move your cursor hard left or right, the rain will lean but it will not speed up. It is stubborn in a calm way.

Rules I used

1. Each raindrop has a velocity and an acceleration.

2. Acceleration acts like steering, not like speed boosting.

3. After applying acceleration, I force the velocity back to a constant magnitude so every drop keeps the same speed.

4. Cursor movement creates wind direction, but the wind eases in and out so it feels natural, not like a switch.

5. Mouse click adds more drops, it does not change the physics.

Code highlight I am proud of

This is the moment where the whole concept becomes real. I let acceleration steer the motion, then I “lock” the speed so nothing can accidentally accelerate out of control:

This is basically my “thesis”. The rain can have mood and direction changes, but it stays consistent. It feels grounded.

Embeded sketch

Reflection + future improvements

I love how it turned out honestly

What worked:

• The constant speed constraint makes the sketch feel controlled and intentional. Even when the wind changes, it stays believable and not chaotic.

• The eased wind makes interaction feel like a real force building up, not a sudden game mechanic.

• The click-to-add drops changes the “weather intensity” without breaking the physics.

What I would improve next:

• Depth: Add a second layer of drops that are thinner and slightly slower, so it feels like near/far rain.

• Gust behavior: Instead of mapping wind directly to mouseX every frame, make occasional gusts that ramp up and decay, then let the cursor influence gust direction.

• Splashes: When drops hit the bottom, spawn tiny splash particles for a few frames.

• Performance polish: Use an object pool for drops so we reuse drops instead of constantly adding new ones when clicking.

 

Concept

For this assignment, I made a random walker to explore motion in a very basic but visual way. The walker moves around the canvas using randomness, but not in a totally chaotic way. Most of its steps are small, with occasional larger jumps, because the step size comes from a Gaussian distribution.

Half of the time, the walker is influenced by the mouse position, and the other half of the time it moves randomly. I liked this balance because it feels like a mix of control and letting go. On top of that, the walker also moves through color. As it travels, its color changes based on how much it moves, so motion is shown not just by position, but also through hue.

Code Highlight

This line is one of my favorite parts of the sketch:

What I like about it is how simple it is, but how much it does. The color changes depending on how far the walker moves. Small movements create small color shifts, and bigger movements create more noticeable changes. It helped me understand how motion can be translated into something visual without making the code complicated.

Embedded Sketch

Reflection and Future Ideas

This project helped me better understand how randomness works in code, especially the difference between regular random values and Gaussian randomness. The movement felt much more natural and less jittery when I used randomGaussian(). I also realized how much small visual choices, like opacity, line weight, and color mode, affect how the sketch feels overall.

If I continue working on this, I would like to experiment with multiple walkers instead of just one, and see how they interact visually. I’m also interested in adding noise to make the movement smoother over time, or applying the same motion logic to something other than color, like scale or sound.