I want to try to explain once and for all what it is I’m doing with my Procedural Painting series. There is alot in the actual process of planning and creating the work and I have tried to write the rules of my algorithm down. The only part of the algorithm I have previously written down have been the tables I use. The tables are at the bottom of the ‘Pseudo code’.

Procedural Paintings the ‘pseudo code.’

Before we start on this please remember all of the random variables are calculated by rolling dice.

This is an example of the ‘code’ I have used for my paintings in version 2.0. Each version has a different set of coding rules. I have stripped back some of the complexity of the ‘code ’ because the first draft was horrible to look at and just unreadable.

The first thing is to decide how many paintings will be in the series version. For that I roll 1d6 ( I roll 1, 6 sided dice) and consult table 1. Then I roll the dice that has been chosen. That will decide the number of painting s in the series.

For V2.0 I decided to use coloured grounds on each of the canvases. So for each canvas I rolled 1d8 and went to table 2.

Each painting consists of Layers, Stages and Steps. The Steps have 3 sections to them:

Direction -which can be either 4 points of movement or 8 (see table3)
length – which is calculated using table 1 and rolling the specified dice for the value.
Thickness of brush stroke – see table 4 details of each brush stroke, its length, direction and thickness.

The stages are either linked together or separated based on an odds evens roll. Each new start point for a stage is a random point on the border of the painting. At each new start point of a stage the opacity and tonal values of the paint is randomised.

When all the stages in a layer have been completed. A random number of rectangles, the size , opacity and tonal values of which have been randomised.

The next layer and its stages and steps are painted over this, and so on until the last step has been followed.

Over the course of a painting mistakes will happen, I might misread a line and paint a step right 5cms instead of left. If this happens I follow the steps to the end of the stage for both the mistake and the correct series directions. The mistake is dry-brushed to highlight it as different.

I hope that is manages to clear up some of the process. If you need more clarification then please ask away.

(edit- I added the image below and the tables lost their format, so I took a screen shot instead.)

The image below has the tables referred to in the text.