Creating generative art with Flash

With numerous Flickr pools and other sites such as www.generatorx.no devoted to displaying generative art, this creative trend is gaining steam. With some of the more popular tools such as VVVV and Processing being easy enough to use, but a bit esoteric, you may feel left out as a Flash user.

With Adobe’s release of ActionScript 3.0, it’s possible to create beautiful generative pieces using tools you already have in your arsenal. Here, we’ll explore some basic tenets of generative art and you’ll learn how to augment your efforts using Adobe’s online kuler service.

Randomness, fantastic colour themes and some display filters will be employed to create one-of-a-kind compositions. The algorithms we’ll use are simple but effective and should serve as inspirational launching points for your own exploration of the field.

Each step of the tutorial, where appropriate, has an accompanying FLA file (found in the support files) with ActionScript 3 in it. If any of the text isn’t self-evident, open that step’s file and learn how it’s done from the code.

Click here to download the support files (7.88MB)