One Year of Daily Sketching

For over a year now I've created a p5 sketch each day. After recently rereading my intentions for the this practice I've decided to mark the anniversary with an update.

Here is the first sketch I created on August 27, 2024.

a barely visible white bar fades into a grey background

And here is the sketch I created on August 27, 2025.

black rectangles overlapping. Periodically changing size and orientation.

Neither sketch is technically advanced, or artistically profound. I'm not particularly proud of either but in a way that's the point. They are an exercise in showing up, grinding on something each day. As in the mythical pottery class, they are to be judged on their total weight.

Although I've been programming a lot, I've a learned a lot during this process; I've developed small tricks to perfectly size items, creating grids is now so familiar that I could do it in my sleep, I know p5 as a tool even more deeply than I did before. I can also look back and see what I'm aesthetically drawn to and where I feel like I can continue to grow as a creative coder. I also have a lot of code that I can draw inspiration from.

Inspiration / Process

After just a few days of sketching I began to look around my environment for inspiration. It started with the humble Pompdoek towel that is in every home, restaurant and bar in the Netherlands.

Everywhere I looked I started to see geometric patterns that I could translate into code. This started to be both a game and a way to understand the world through code.

The brick facade of de Bijenkork in Amsterdam becomes a subdivided arrangement of rectangles and squares.

a brick facade next to a animated gif of dividing rectangles

The sidewalk of Shanghai becomes an impossible puzzle.

yellow stripes painted on sidewalk pavers have been scrambled, a animated gif showing my interpretation

Caution tape wrapped around a beam in Hong Kong interpreted as broken, chaotic pattern.

The left hand side shows black and yellow caution taped wrapped around beam in an irregular pattern. On the right an animated gif interpretation of the image

Then seeing a similar design half way around the world on my way to the studio.

The left hand side shows blue and what caution tape covering a window. On the right an animated gif interpretation of the image, blue and white chevron stripe irregularly crossing over each other

I also look for inspiration in the work of other artists and designers such as a page from Bruno Munari's book Design and Visual Communication.

The left hand side shows visual pattern made up of squares with a think black border. On the right is an animated interpretation.

Often times I start by trying to make a code best replica of an artwork, then I remix and reinterpret over several days. Here is my interpretation of a painting Sky Sea West East (1980) by Awazu Kiyoshi (粟津潔).

The left side of the image shows colorful painted lines, imperfect in places. On the right is an animated interpretation.

Some geometric patterns such as the Ocean Wave quilt are a challenge to translate to code.

The left hand image is over an quilt pattern made up of small rectangles. On the right is a black and white representation of the same pattern produced through code.

I find myself working in series, building off the same code over several days, making slight changes and improvements as I go along. My interest wanes after a few days and I move on to the next idea.

A grid of six images showing the progression of the sketch from a simple static pattern to a complex animation.

Some days, the sketches are therapy. Here I was struggling to get a small screen to work with a Raspberry Pi. I decided to recreate the bad screen output as a sketch, not to fix the problem but to memorialize my struggles.

On the left is small screen connected to a breadboard. The image on the screen is a red square over noise. I recreated this in p5.

Sometimes I give up and accept the limits of my time and capacity for effort for the day. I keep those "failures" nonetheless.

a red star figure on a white background, the word fail in the top left corner.

Some mistakes are happy ones. Here I making a Conway's Game of Life using p5 but I wasn't correctly isolating each generation. I think my "mistake" resulted in something more interesting than a straight copy of the original.

An animated gif. White squares on a black background. They quickly reproduce to take over the entire scene.

The days I don’t want to do it usually turn out the most rewarding or insightful. I don’t “like” what I make each day. Some days I surprise myself.

Year Two

As I enter the second year of doing this, there are somethings goals that I have set for myself.

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Add descriptions / context so I remember the inspiration.
Use my daily practice as a vehicle for learning new things and experimenting more.

You can see all my sketches here