As a group of artists interested in various types of art mediums, our team identified our number one struggle with creativity: having creative block. Inspired to help other artists across the world facing the same problem, we created ARTillery, a website that not only gives them a simple prompt to follow, but also gives them various options to draw inspiration from.
ARTillery gives the users three options to find creativity: Inspire Me!, Personalize, and Teach Me. The first option allows the user to choose whether they want to be inspired by a word prompt, color palette, and/or a song, and generates suggestions accordingly. The “Personalize” option takes in users’ input for art style, preferred art medium, and current mood to generate a color palette, an example art piece, as well as an artist for the user to get inspiration from. Finally, the last option, “Teach Me”, presents the users a beginners tutorial on the art medium of their choice, encouraging them to go out of their comfort zone and experiment with new techniques.
We used HTML, CSS and Javascript to code the website. We also used Bootstrap, jquery, and [this] (https://css-tricks.com/blobs/) source for animated blobs. The color palettes are randomly generated by thecolorapi.
Throughout this project, we learned how to host a website with Heroku, how to register a domain name, how to use animations in websites, how to prioritize certain objectives in a project, how to use git, how to use photoshop to make a logo, how to make check boxes and radio buttons look like normal buttons, and how to generate random palettes of colors.
The main challenges we faced were collaborating 100% online and figuring out how to make the most out of discord (pinning, screen-sharing, creating a million channels and having to find out to which channel a piece of information belongs) and synchronizing - given the fact that we’re spread across 3 different time zones.
We’re very proud that at the end of the weekend we have a fully-functioning website, that we also managed to host and for which we have registered a domain name.
We want to make the recommendations even more personal, by taking into account the user’s favorite genre of music and chosen subject of drawing. We also want to feature a tally of how many people got inspired to create art from the generated prompts, along with a section for feedback and requests for other art mediums. We would also love to allow users to create accounts and keep a personal gallery of the art that they created based on the given prompts.