I’ve recently gotten into a unique form of making art by simulating the placement of millions of particles of sand. The ideas stemmed from the pieces of work created by Anders Hoff @inconvergent. After discovering his twitter I was really intrigued by the creation process of some of his works. I found one style of art particularly interesting and I seeked to recreate the process and discover some of the magic behind the art. The process involved drawing tiny dots over and over to build up and create patterns. By giving each dot a single formula and applying some randomness to it’s position over time a unique style of “Sand Art” is created.

Through my experimentations I discovered that changing the randomness of placement and the order in which the dots were drawn created some unique patterns.

Below are 9 of the first iterations I created using the technique. There not fantastic by any means but I’ve learnt so much from experimenting with the formulas. Some of them turned out better than others, due to creating them on shadertoy and just playing around with the formula used to create them, I unfortunately don’t have a lot of the formula’s saved.

Brand New Cool Sand Art!

Created with vochsel.com/sand.art

Sand Art Collection

Sand.Art Tool

The process was initially started on shadertoy.com which is an online sandbox for WebGL GLSL fragment shaders. The above images have been created in some sketches there however the creation process, and the exporting of the images suffered from the limitations of shadertoy. So I’ve begun work on creating a purpose built webpage for this type of art. With more options to change the resolution, export as a png, save formulas and more. It’s still in development but progress has been made. Below is a screenshot of the current build.

The site is Live! View it here vochsel.com/sand.art
GitHub Link, it’s currently still very in development.