Creative Coding in Python

...all you need is a web browser

Who am i?

• I am Kaustubh Maske Patil
• I’m a programmer and Free and Open Source (FOSS) enthusiast
• I like to create art with code for fun
• I self-host my software!
• Google Summer of Code @ Postgres
• 🔗 kaustubh.page
• 🐤 @n1kochiko

What is Creative Coding

• In the beginning, there was art
• Then, there were computers
• Why not make art with computers?

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What’s so good about creative coding?

• Great way to learn!
• You can create beautiful things from the start

What is

• Online non-profit platform to learn programming, managed by FOSS United
• The most popular course on the platform is The Joy of Programming
• The course introduces Python through a creative coding library called Joy
• From mon.school, we also get access to a Python interpreter where we can run our code and see the output

Navigating mon.school

• Go to mon.school
• Explore → Sketches → Submit a sketch

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See next page for visuals…

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Basic Shapes

• Circle
• Rectangle
• Line

Circle

• By default, grid of 300x300 pixels
• Circle has default radius 100px

Circle - customising

• Optionally, can take radius as argument r.

Rectangle

• Like circle, rectangle is also centered at (0, 0) by default
• Default height: 100px
• Default width: 200px

Rectangle – customising

• w: width of rectangle
• h: height of rectangle

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Line

• Optionally, takes x1, y1, x2, y2.
• (x1, y1) are coordinates of starting point
• (x2, y2) are coordinates of ending point

Combining shapes

• We can show multiple shapes, one on top of another
• Let’s draw concentric circles

Transforming shapes – moving shapes around

• translate(x=..., y=...) can be applied
• E.g. if you want to move a shape to the right, give positive x value (number of pixels to move to the right)

Transforming shapes – big and small

• Shapes can be made big or small with the scale(...) transformation
• If value > 1, then�shape will be�bigger
• If value < 1, then�shape will be�smaller
• Concentric circles!

Transforming shapes – rotation

• Shapes can be rotated anticlockwise by a certain number of degrees with the rotate(...) transformation

Repeating transformations

• We saw transformations – translate, scale, rotate
• We can apply transformations repeatedly to get patterns with repeat(n, transformation)

Fun with repeating transformations

“Where did the circle come from?”

More repeating transformations

• You can combine transformations. Let’s rotate and scale

Colors

• Every shape takes a fill and stroke argument
• e.g.

Colors

• And stroke is for the borders
• You can also remove border by setting stroke to “none”

Combining colors and transformations

Thank You!