When you type something, you are creating abstract art that is totally personal to you and completely original. Unless someone else has typed the exact same words in the exact same order, what you create is truly unique. As you type and watch your masterpiece take form, you can rightly think of yourself as a bona fide abstract artist!
The sections below describe how all this works, and explains why your art is original and beautiful.
This is the antithesis of AI-slop!
How your words become a painting
Firstly, you must understand that this is not generative AI. It's just mathematics, pure and simple.
No AI. No image-processing library. No trying to understand what the words you type actually mean. No guessing at what the sloppy output should look like.
Your words are NOT a prompt. They are the fingerprint that makes your work unique. They're the pigment!
To a computer, every letter is already a number. We simply use those numbers and string them together in such a way that they generate a fingerprint shared by no other sequence of words. That fingerprint is the seed of your painting. You can even see it displayed below the image.
Every decision that follows — from the colour of the canvas to the last flicked droplet — is calculated from this seed by fixed, human-written rules. Nothing is imagined, nothing is retrieved, nothing is trained, and nothing is stored. No LLMs or tokens are harmed by your creative works!
Neither are the water supply or the rural communities living next to data centers. This all happens in your browser.
Colouring by numbers
Each word claims its own colour. Its letters add up to choose a hue from a scheme the whole phrase agrees on, and its vowels set how vividly that hue glows. Open, breathy, vowel-rich words shine. Clenched, consonant-heavy words turn muted. Long words occupy more of the canvas, depending on the style you choose to apply. For example, longer words become taller blocks in the field colours, heavier strokes in the drip styles, and larger stars in the constellation style.
Faithful reproductions
Because it's plain mathematics, the painting is faithful to what you type. The same words produce the same picture (down to the last speck of grain) forever. Change a single letter or add a punctuation mark and watch how everything shifts.
As we like to emphasise, every phrase already has its painting. You're not generating it, you're revealing it!
The styles
When you have typed your words, you can then apply zero, one or more styles. You can even apply all of them together. The only real way to learn is to play, but here's a quick description of each style in isolation:
- Colour Fields. This style is a Rothko-esque output of large colour blocks with softer, variable edging. 'Color Field' painting is a major sub-movement of 'Abstract Expressionism' and many people like this style on its own. But when applied with other styles, the blocks form the background of the piece. In any case, the fields are arranged by converting the words into a number of 'voices'. How many voices share each row (one, two, or three) is itself drawn from the seed, and each block's width is claimed by the length of the word that colours it.
- Drip Painting. More like a Jackson Pollock or a Max Ernst, this style resembles a painting where an artist pours, drops, or flings liquid paint onto a flat or upright surface instead of using traditional brush strokes. This turns gravity and motion into core parts of the art. In our mathematics, each word is one gesture — a random walk with momentum. Consonant-dense words turn more sharply. Longer words move quickly and press more heavily. And the mathematics of gravity has a voice too (as seen by the drips).
- Constellations. This style is the easiest to describe, but the hardest to predict! Circles and curves are joined by lines. What could be simpler? Every word becomes a star or planet, with its radius determined by its length. The glow is derived from the word's calculated colour, and satellites are created from its leftover letters after some simple mathematics. A thin line joins the words in reading order so your words are literally a path through the sky!
- Suprematism. Suprematism is an abstract art movement focused on basic geometric shapes like squares, circles, and rectangles. They are painted in simple colors. This early 20th-century Russian style rejected real-life objects to emphasize "the supremacy of pure artistic feeling" and boundless space represented purely by shapes and colours. In this style, words float as coloured forms. The longest word is the dominant shape, while tilts are determined by ratios of vowels to consonants. Additionally, short words fly as squadrons of bars and any word containing an "o" becomes a circle instead of a rectangle. Simple, eh?
- Soak-Stain. When creating in the soak-stain style, artists use turpentine to thin their oils (or water to thin their acrylic paints). They pour it directly onto raw, unprimed canvas (usually lying on the floor) and let the fabric absorb the pigment. Likewise, we simulate words being poured as thinned colour onto raw canvas. Translucent blooms are created mathematically, with each one sagging slightly downward to obey gravity. The stains multiply in their intensity when they overlap, just like in the real world. When applied with other styles, the soak-stains act as an overlay that glazes whatever lies beneath.
- Nothing selected. If you deslect all styles, then something very experimental happens. Our mathematics applies one or more styles from the values of the characters your have typed. This is a work in progress, and you are more likely to create somnething to your taste by purposefully selecting the styles. But we included this concept as a fun thing to play around with.