Generative Art

How to make flow field art

1. Watch the artwork draw itself: thousands of particles drift through an invisible field of currents, leaving coloured trails.
2. Change the palette, number of particles, swirl (how tightly the currents curve) and line width. Every change starts a new drawing.
3. Press New for a different random seed. The same seed and settings always produce the same artwork, so copy the link to share it or come back to it, and download a high-resolution PNG for a wallpaper or print.

How flow fields work

A flow field assigns a direction to every point on the canvas, like wind on a weather map. Here the directions come from Perlin noise, a smooth random function that Ken Perlin developed in the 1980s after working on the film Tron, and which is now widely used for clouds, terrain and textures in computer graphics. Because neighbouring points have similar values, the directions change gradually, so particles that follow them trace graceful, flowing curves rather than random scribbles.

Each particle moves a small step in the direction of the field at its position, draws a faint line, and repeats. Thousands of semi-transparent trails build up into dense, woven textures. When a particle leaves the canvas or reaches the end of its life, it is reborn somewhere random. Flow fields are a classic technique in generative art, popularised by artists such as Tyler Hobbs; this version runs entirely in your browser with a seeded random generator so results are reproducible.