One day of 2020, I stumbled upon a hn thread mysteriously titled “Wobblepaint”

Upon inspection this title is not so mysterious as it is a paint application that wobbles. It is in fact pretty darn descriptive. I tried it, and it was pretty fun:

You can play it directly in your browser if you want!

I decided to take up drawing one per day. After a few pop-culture ones, I went into fine art and studied in more details some of my favourite artists, and did a few landscapes based on Unsplash photos. There are a number of characteristics that makes this program pretty darn interesting, both from a technical standpoint and from an artistic standpoint. These unique points lead me to learn quite a few things while having fun, explaining why I kept going for so many days.

Go to this page for the full gallery!

Technical considerations

First, let’s start with the technical particularities of this program. The first thing is that being based on Pico-8, the resolution is limited to 128x128 pixels. So we are restricted to low resolution pixel art in a square format. Furthermore, there are only 16 available colors. Each stroke ‘wobbles’ in a cyclic fashion as you lay them, making precise drawing nigh impossible, further restricting possibilities. This is a vector-based application: it remembers what stroke is done with which parameters (brush tip, color, and path). This has the happy consequence to allow for unlimited undo as well as a string representation that can easily be stored or shared. You can load up this string and undo as necessary or continue the drawing in another session. There is an unhappy consequence though: because the CPU of Pico-8 is also severely limited, the more strokes happen and the more the program struggles to keep up, resulting in noticeable lag that combines with the wobbling, making drawing harder with time.

Wobblepainting

All these constraints are sure to be a boon for creativity! Going over these constraints in reverse order, the CPU limit means that we have to achieve our artistic statement with a limited number of brushstrokes. Since we can change the brush size, that means laying down big blotches of color first, and then gradually reduce it as we go deeper into the details. It also means prioritizing the subject matter over the background for which imprecise brushstrokes are less penalizing. Here is a video of that process (sped up by 10, original is 11 minutes):

There is also a real-time video on my Youtube channel.

After a few pop random drawings, I thought about making some painting ‘demakes’, and started with some of the most famous ones (Monet’s Impression, the Mona Lisa, Hokusai’s wave…).

As the impressionists did, you can apply different colors so that the mixing happens in the viewer’s eye; in Wobblepaint good use of dithering, made easy by some brushtips, lets you get over the 16 colors limit. I did quite a lot of Chinese and Japanese artists, and in particular spent one week on Hiroshi Yoshida and one on descendants of the Yoshida family.

This made me realize that while I found them to be exceedingly beautiful, their Wobblepaint demakes weren’t as good as more classical paintings. The main reason being that one appeal of their beauty came from the subtle color choices that strayed from classic color schemes. In that case, the Pico-8 palette, focusing on primary colors, would necessarily be off-key. That made me consider how the technological progress made that we get more interesting color schemes but that they would also lose the direct impact that simplicity conveys.

In art there is something called the “Green problem”, that acidic greens look bad and destroy a painting. Since Pico-8 does not have many colors, its green is not acidic, it’s atomic. So it made it hard to work with some landscapes. Thankfully it has a secret palette of 16 additional colors, and thanks to code from Bonevolt, you can swap any of the default 16 colors for one from the secret palette. The greens from this palette are much more palatable.

So I picked it up, loaded it into wobblepaint’s code, and used that version of Wobblepaint to get a combinatorial explosion of new color schemes! Here are a few comparisons, without and with the second palette:

It turns out that ‘Impression’ by Monet is both the 13th and 143rd. There are so many dimensions to reduce that there are always interesting artistic choices to perform, leading to very different results.

Last series I made was from a number of wallpaper from Unsplash (I installed the new tab extension for Firefox, and it is often distracting to have too nice pictures!). Interestingly, it’s significantly harder to make than a painting demake. In a painting, a lot of elements have been interpreted, simplified and modified by the painter’s eye, which reduce the world’s complexity to make a clear statement. From a photo, you need to make that work yourself.

Parting thoughts

These wobblepaint are a weird variant of “master study”, where you redraw the painting of a master to learn more about the process. I chose that approach to limit the intellectual effort required to draw one. This was necessary to make it a daily habit, each drawing taking very rarely more than 15 minutes. What I did not expect is that I would not be able to contain my curiosity, and that I would spend hours researching some of the artists beforehand. But it wasn’t without reward:

All in all, that was a fantastic journey that lead me to know more about artists and their craft. It lead me to discover the fantastic Pico-8 community and a lot of other great things that I’ll cover in another post. All thanks to a random hn thread.

Little Bonus: here is the Cosmoose crew, my music band, in Wobblepaint: