Floating in space, watching the stars shimmer and shine while others explode like beautiful fireworks. My generative artwork encapsulates this idea into an atmospheric hero image. The image will be suspended, surrounded by a void of black while the exploding and shimmering stars light up the area around a floating island with 2 characters drawn by me in an 8-bit style to convey a theme of loneliness, beauty, and insignificance. Additionally, I used curved forms for the stars and fireworks as I wanted this to juxtapose the 8-bit aesthetic used for the foreground to create depth and interest. I added in a randomly generated aspect of fireworks to enhance the imagery of the stars to make their presence more powerful and brilliant as stars are much larger and more powerful than humans, thus, further inferring my theme of insignificance.

Based on the generative values of cellular automata I created a matrix that is responsive to mouse clicks, allowing you to draw white cells on the background that interact with one-another creating patterns and walkers. This is heavily based upon the 'Game of Life' concept which was tweaked to resemble circular stars rather than cubes which optimised how many rows and columns of stars could be generated without lagging the system.

The code was written in Javascript while the artwork was drawn in Adobe Photoshop.

The button below is a link to my GitHub profile where the project is in the repository. It has explainations written through-out the code to show my understanding.