Paths

Routes through the material, ordered by what actually has to come first. The sequence is not curated — it is computed from the prerequisites each page states, so adding one page improves every path that touches it and there is no separate curriculum to maintain.

From noise to flow fields

The most-copied look in contemporary generative art, and the one whose failure modes are least written down. Ends with you able to tell a field that reads as weather from one that reads as hair.

Flow field — Build a grid of direction vectors (from noise, or from an attractor like the mouse), then advect many particles through it and draw their traced paths.

Getting a drawing off the screen

Vector output, path optimisation and the constraints a physical pen imposes — the ones that change what is worth drawing in the first place.

Not ready — the goal medium.pen-plotter has no page yet.

Drawing with distance instead of geometry

Signed distance fields, and why describing a shape as "how far am I from it" makes some things trivial that are painful with polygons.

Ray Marching — Render a scene defined by signed distance functions by stepping camera rays forward by the SDF's own returned distance until they hit a surface or run out of steps.

Colour that survives contact with a screen

Perceptual colour spaces, interpolation that does not go grey in the middle, and palettes that hold together across a whole series.

Not ready — the goal prim.oklch has no page yet.