Jumping straight into projects is sometimes the best thing to do

Three days ago I posted a short "article" where I talked about a small project I worked on featuring a small program I made in C# that helps me combine static text that never changes, with text that changes each time, without having to do it manually.

Soon, I hope, I'll post another "article" where I'll talk about another new project I've been "working" on (I'll explain the quotes in a moment), regarding something I recently discovered called "generative systems".

Long story short - I really like art, but I'm not that great at it. I'm impatient, I want things to be done as quickly as possible, and I don't like when I have to spend hours and hours on tiny little details that are incredibly tedious and frustrating to make.

The thing I hate most is the fact that whenever I try to do something specific, I always end up with something I'm not extremely happy with. That mainly comes from the fact that I'm not good enough at art yet to be able to create an exact visual representation of what I have in my head.

That's why I love to sometimes work on something and noting at the same time (translation: random art). I like to just open up Blender or Photoshop and start creating things without having a clear idea of what I'd like to make.

And that worked quite well a lot of times to be honest. Because of that process I managed to create things such as this, this, this, and this.

It's how I created most of the photo effects that I transformed into Actions and I'm selling on Graphic River.

Because of that, I recently got an idea after finishing the C# project.

I'm new to coding, but I understand the core concepts. I know that you can use code to do pretty much anything you want, including, obviously, to draw shapes and elements. And I know that using code, you can randomize a lot of values, and maybe, just maybe, you can use those random values to create random shapes and elements, and combine them together into something interesting.

And, with a bit of research, I found out that the entire explanation above can be summarized with the words "generative system".

Now, being a beginner and all that, I'm sure that those two words can describe a lot of other things, but among them, is a system that uses randomization to create some sort of artworks. And I got really curious about the process and how it works.

My first instinct was, like usual, to spend a few days reading articles and figuring out if it's gonna be worth to put in the work and even get into something like this.

However, I remembered how I started and actually managed to learn C# better than any other programming languages I tried in the past - instead of focusing too much on the how and on the why, I simply started. I watched a course explaining the basic syntax and concepts needed to code in C#, and after that I began working on my own projects.

So that's exactly what I started doing this time as well. Instead of spending time reading articles about how generative systems work, and whether it's worth building or using one or not, I just found a tutorial that seemed easy and comprehensive enough, and followed it.

It has 21 parts, and I'm at video nr. 15, so I still have a few more to go, but to my surprise, things are going well. Honestly, all I do is mostly follow the tutorial and mainly writing the code that I see on screen myself (which is why I used the quotes on the word "working" at the beginning of the post), but I still understand quite a lot of it, even if it's JavaScript, and I'm trying to think about ways to customize it for different results.

Besides, writing that type of code, instead of thinking too much about it, helped me understand some concepts that I had a hard time understanding before, like OOP (object oriented programming).

So, if there's anything you can take out of this article, is that sometimes just starting to do something can be much quicker and much better for you than doing a lot of research and trying to figure out whether a certain project is worth your time or not.

I'm gonna post an article regarding the project and what I can do with it plus a link to the tutorials I followed once I am done with all the videos and I can show you what I "made".