Kandinsky Bot

Everything starts from a dot.

— Wassily Kandinsky

This program creates random works of "art" in the style of Wassily Kandinsky. Mostly inspired by Composition VIII, though Color Study. Squares with Concentric Circles was an influence as well.

Kandinsky, W. (1923). Composition VIII [Painting]. source: https://www.wassilykandinsky.net/

While most of the images produced by KandinskyBot are trash, there is the odd gem—around 1-2%. The infrequency of quality images is part of the fun.

Here are a few samples:

KandinskyBot (2017). Composition 1141 [Digital].

KandinskyBot (2017). Composition 113 [Digital]

KandinskyBot (2017). Composition 534 [Digital]

More samples in the samples directory.

Also I have an Instagram account (which I have been neglecting) that shows images generated by this bot. Check it out: https://www.instagram.com/kandinskybot/

The graphics library (graphics.py) was written by John Zelle for Chapter 4 of "Python Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science".

Running The Program

To generate single paintings at a time, run src/run.py.

To generate batches of paintings, run src/batch_run.py.

Output

Output images are in .eps format. To convert to a raster format I'd recommend using ImageMagick, which you can get with:

brew install imagemagick

if you have Homebrew installed. Otherwise visit their site.

Then you can convert an image (image.eps) to some other format (image.png) with:

convert -density 300 image.eps image.png

To convert many .eps files, this is a handy script (run from the directory containing the .eps files):

for img in *.eps
do
	convert -density 300 $img ${img%.*}.png
done

Note: It will take a while.