p5.js is a powerful JavaScript library that makes coding accessible and easy for artists, designers, and creative coders. It allows for the creation of interactive graphics, animations, and digital art projects with just a few lines of code. On this page, you’ll find a variety of p5.js resources, including tutorials, courses, workshops, and more, designed to help you explore and master this creative tool.
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Artist of The Week #40: Jimena Buena Vida
I make art with code, and I don’t begin with a clear plan for what the final piece should look like. I usually start with a pattern, a movement, or a question I’m curious about. Then I change things, break things, and respond to what appears on the screen. Code gives me a structure to work within, but intuition helps me decide where the work goes
ARTIST BIO
Jimena Buena Vida is a Colombian-born generative artist creating abstract digital works with code, color, and motion. Her practice blends computer science, emotional healing, motherhood, and human connection into luminous visual systems. Through her work, she invites viewers into a space of softness, meditation, and inner expansion, where technology becomes a portal for feeling, memory, and renewal.
- Web: https://www.buenavidaart.com/
- Instagram: @JimenaBuenaVida
- X: @JimenaBuenaVida
The pieces I uploaded show my generative work in different physical and public contexts: metro stations, street screens, gallery walls, lobbies, and large-scale digital displays. I’m interested in how code-based abstract work changes when it leaves the computer and enters real spaces. These mockups and installation views explore scale, color, motion, and how the work interacts with architecture and people moving around it. For me, the pieces are not just images on screens. They are studies of how digital work can create atmosphere, presence, and emotional impact in public space.
What Is one belief, insight, or idea that guides your creative process?
I believe art is a way of listening to what is moving inside me before I have words for it. Code gives me structure, but color, repetition, and motion reveal the feeling. My process is guided by curiosity, intuition, and the desire to turn inner chaos into beauty.
Can you tell us how you discovered Mixed art and what drew you into it?
I discovered generative art through blockchain art in 2021. What drew me in was realizing code could be more than technical: it could be visual and emotional. I love creating systems with rules, rhythm, and repetition that still evolve, respond, and reveal something unexpected.
What do you think defines your style or creative approach, and how did you arrive at that identity?
My style is to have no fixed style. I don’t want to be trapped by one recognizable formula. The real material is intuition. I make, break, repeat, and listen until the work tells me what it wants to become. My creative identity is experimental, responsive, and always evolving.
How does a project usually begin for you? Do you have a creative ritual or structure you follow?
I don’t have a perfect ritual. I try to dedicate 2-3h interrupted to sketching daily. I usually begin with a question: what happens if I push this further? I start experimenting with the code and try not to control it too much. Some things work and some don’t. I let the art lead the process.
What tools or technologies do you use most, and how do they influence your visual language?
I mostly use p5.js, and recently shaders. They let me work quickly, test ideas, and build motion directly in the browser. The tools influence my visual language because they make me think in systems: rules, loops, grids, color logic, and repetition.
Do you feel there Is a strong generative art scene? What would you like to see evolve in it
Yes, there is a strong generative art scene, but I’d like to see it become less tied to hype and more connected to process, craft, and long-term support for artists. I’d love more spaces for experimentation, education, thoughtful critique, and showing work beyond screens.
What advice would you give to someone who wants to start creating generative art but doesn’t know where to begin?
Start simple. Pick one p5.js editor, OpenProcessing, and make small sketches every day. Don’t try to make a masterpiece at first. Learn by changing numbers, breaking things, and asking why something works. The fastest way in is to play, test, and keep going. Do it for 90 days!
Which artists or creators do you think are doing remarkable work and deserve much more recognition?
There are so many, but I’d love to see more recognition for women, Latin American, mothers, and self-taught creative coders. Especially artists building quietly, experimenting deeply, and expanding generative art beyond hype, trends, and one specific market. I love Emily Weil and James Merrill!
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Artist of The Week #38: vertex.shader
If it’s in your heart you just pour energy into making it real. Sacrifice everything else make it happen
ARTIST BIO
vertex.shader (Samir Ghosh) is a VR researcher and creative coder.
For Samir, creative coding is a way to translate the geometric visions and aesthetic patterns from his head into reality, sharing them with the friends he holds in his heart, whether over the internet (cyberspace) or in real life (meatspace).
He also loves helping other artists bring their own visions to life on both a local and global scale. Sometimes these projects have deep meaning or utility, and other times they just look cool.
Conveniently, this creative practice also serves his day job, helping him continuously train and sharpen his skills in 3D code, color, and light for data visualization and virtual environment design.
- Web: https://samir.tech
- Tiktok: vertex.shader
- Patreon: https://vertexshader.substack.com
1) Dandelions – A wind reactive piece! You blow on it on the phone microphone to make it go. – p5.js / mobile 2) Butterflies – hold out your hand in VR and make a butterfly land on it. A real thing that happened to me- Three.js 3) Styx – inspired by memories melting away, the good and the poison all together. GLSL 4) Diamonds – sparkly thing based on a dancer’s favorite earrings. p5j.s. my first piece with code-assistant tools. New me, new era 5) twist – Trigonometric functions of meshlines. Listened to a really sad Bossa Nova song on nonstop. 6) Tower – Interpreting a 2010s concept of grids in Three.js. 7) Radiation – Mute. Quiet, Digitally gothic 8) Tornado – Speed coded putting together tons of double helixes of DNA and made it rainbow.
What Is one belief, insight, or idea that guides your creative process?
If it’s in your heart you just pour energy into making it real. Sacrifice everything else make it happen
Can you tell us how you discovered Mixed art and what drew you into it?
My friend Leo showed me open frameworks back in ‘14. Then we participated in a tech+art club in college. That’s where I learned a lot of creative code
What do you think defines your style or creative approach, and how did you arrive at that identity?
I love the generative art of the mid 2010s. Open source coders making geometric patterns, art, and such in online communities. I also would make code for parties, that’s how I’d know about it or get in
How does a project usually begin for you? Do you have a creative ritual or structure you follow?
I try to make it web accessible. Sometimes it’s for a particular person, usually a spark for someone I have a crush on. However, most of the time, I just get this wild, other-worldly geometric colorful vision of code an graphics and I just throw away everything else that i’m supposed to be doing
What tools or technologies do you use most, and how do they influence your visual language?
p5.js, three.js, and raw shader code like GLSL. I love perlin noise, RGB, and the beauty of basic parameterized algebra and trigonometry
Do you feel there Is a strong generative art scene? What would you like to see evolve in it
Hell yeah. Genuary.art is the best. I wish there was a way that people could get paid for it more. LIke, not a lot, but if you put in honest work with daily sketches for a week, maybe you get enough for a cappuccino.
What advice would you give to someone who wants to start creating generative art but doesn’t know where to begin?
Make something every day. You can even just vibe code art with a coding assistant, because that counts too! Shoutout Ian @elbomdiggity
Which artists or creators do you think are doing remarkable work and deserve much more recognition?
Sarah Ciston made this incredible work that is heartful, critical, and badass that covers the surveillance state and how AI is affecting us in so many ways. Katherine Yang makes these incredible poetic tools. You gotta go check them out!
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Artist of The Week #37: gaudisketch
– Code Is Soul – – Code is Clay – – Code is Free – Mathematician, photographer and philosopher.
ARTIST BIO
gaudisketch comes from an unusual mix of backgrounds: mathematician, photographer, and philosopher. His relationship with code began early, at a time when he was taking programs apart and watching how artists wrote intros directly in machine code. That origin shaped his identity — a technical, direct, and unadorned approach that he describes as a sensibility close to “punk noise.”
- Web: https://gaudi.neocities.org/
- Instagram: @gaudisketch
- Tiktok: @gaudiramone
- X: @gaudiramone
- Patreon: https://linktr.ee/gaudiramone
https://objkt.com/tokens/open_objkt/28307
What Is one belief, insight, or idea that guides your creative process?
Artist turn pain into art. I turn hatred into art.
Can you tell us how you discovered Mixed art and what drew you into it?
when we cracked programs, the artists put the intros in machine code now in java it’s easier and just as fun
What do you think defines your style or creative approach, and how did you arrive at that identity?
My style is punk noise, because I don’t know how to make normal art; I’m technical, so that’s the easiest thing for me. My influences are Kraftwerk and Geometric Splendor.
How does a project usually begin for you? Do you have a creative ritual or structure you follow?
An image, a news story, a book, or a feeling. I think…. I could put it in CODE? And……Go ahead!
What tools or technologies do you use most, and how do they influence your visual language?
The computer, the iPad, the mobile phone, my camera, a song, a movie, an advertisement. Any visual reference is valid. A book, a poem, a quote, a news article. Any verbal reference is justification.
Do you feel there Is a strong generative art scene? What would you like to see evolve in it
YES, my performance partner piti2048, we’re going to be a hit in generative noise.
What advice would you give to someone who wants to start creating generative art but doesn’t know where to begin?
Study, test, and publish. Study, test, and publish. Study, test, and publish. As if tomorrow were the last day of your life. You don’t need external approval; be your own witness.
Which artists or creators do you think are doing remarkable work and deserve much more recognition?
Many, I always think everyone is better than me. I’m not a big fan of specific idols, because I always end up tearing them down.
