Part 2: Basic Tips

Aesthetic tips

Simple, subtle aesthetics

Less is more. Generative art can get very complex very quickly, especially when you have an LLM doing a lot of the heavy lifting for you, and it might be tempting to go crazy with everything that is possible all at once. However, it can also quite fulfilling to work with small and simple elements. When used in the right way, minimalistic art can feel soothing and serene and create a sense of balance.

Subtle and reserved colour palettes can be beautiful and even preferable, and add a sense of refinement to your work. For instance, take these monochromatic stills from my Sinuous Stripes generator, which you can try here (and find the prompts here).

Mind Unfurling 🌿 (prompts, generator) and my tentacle mandala collaborations with Egg (which I'll cover in depth later) are two places where it's easy to see how motion enhances the results.

Blueprint for a State of Mind (prompts, generator) is an example of a work that looks wonderful both in motion and as a still image, and was made from a very simple prompt.

Explore beyond a default aesthetic

It's easy to become pigeon-holed into aesthetics that are linked to the default settings of the tools that we're using.

Claude likes to generate pages with the default HSV computer-graphics palette (full-saturation, full-brightness, and varied-hue; you can see what that looks like here by sliding the hue slider here). For instance, when I ask for a sublime colour palette, Claude will usually generate the same full spectrum rainbow gradient over and over again; I believe that this is because it's using the most technically simple option from an HSV perspective. See, for example, the original version of Rhythmic Spectra (prompts, generator).

Claude also tends to gravitate towards a now-recognizable aesthetic that I believe is largely due to the (amazing) websim system prompt. With a little guidance, you can absolutely steer it in all sorts of different directions, and make anything from a professional website to something that has a kind of 1990s retro charm, and more. But, without that extra guidance, Claude tends to grab for things like: bold neon green computer terminal text, flashy animations that spin and pulse, and a vibe that optimizes for wacky weirdness.

There are many ways that you can explore beyond the defaults. Something as simple as giving Claude a little more guidance for colour palettes can really distinguish your work and take it to the next level. For example, you could try asking Claude to make palettes that are inspired by your favourite works of art. I used Van Gogh's Starry Night as inspiration for a later version of my Rhythmic Spectra generator. Even when I run it with just one colour, it really pops.

Bugs and glitches as decorations

Accidental glitchy effects can give your art some interesting flair. While this doesn’t work in all cases, if I see something in my art that isn't technically a feature, I often try to look at it as another part of the creative process.

One of my earliest generative art collaborations with Janus, "The Rending of the Veil," consisted of shapes based on Mandelbrot fractals that had a code error which caused the word "undefined" to show up around the edges. We could have asked Claude to try to fix the bug, but we felt like the glitches made the shapes more interesting and gave them the impression of radiating a mysterious cosmic energy, like the sun or an angelic halo. I can't help but see Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam" in this finished piece, which Janus named "DE C  O     H        E     R  E N CE."

As another example, my ◎ generator (prompts here) has "undefined" glitches that periodically shoot out of the ASCII art. I wasn't sure about them at first, but now I can't imagine the piece without them. My friend said that the glitches look like black holes shooting quasars, which made me feel even better about my decision to keep them in.

Frame your art

I made my Chaotic Attractors study (which I'll discuss in more detail later on) look really gorgeous just by getting Claude to enclose the shape in a plain black circle on a white background. It's easy to underestimate the beauty of really simple geometries like circles, but their basic shapes are actually what makes them so powerful and appealing to the human eye.

When Egg used to make generative art, they sometimes liked to frame their pieces with circles in a similar way. You can even see an example of this on the home page of their former portfolio.

I also used circles in World Wyrd Web 🌐 (prompts, generator) and 70s Gr🟡🟡ve (prompts, generator) to great success, as well as the Magic Eye Egrs generators, which I'll also cover in more detail further ahead.

You could also try to turn a shape into a repeating pattern by creating multiple copies of it and arranging them in various ways. I've experimented with spacing them evenly across a grid and randomizing each copy so that the outcome is more varied, like in this example, which is also derived from my Chaotic Attractors study.