Simon Willison's Weblog: art

Kākāpō mug by Karen James

2026-02-08T17:25:07+00:00

Friend and neighbour Karen James made me a Kākāpō mug. It has a charismatic Kākāpō, four Kākāpō chicks (in celebration of the 2026 breeding season) and even has some rimu fruit!

I love it so much.

Tags: kakapo, art

Quoting Brandon Sanderson

2026-02-03T02:31:10+00:00

This is the difference between Data and a large language model, at least the ones operating right now. Data created art because he wanted to grow. He wanted to become something. He wanted to understand. Art is the means by which we become what we want to be. [...]

The book, the painting, the film script is not the only art. It's important, but in a way it's a receipt. It's a diploma. The book you write, the painting you create, the music you compose is important and artistic, but it's also a mark of proof that you have done the work to learn, because in the end of it all, you are the art. The most important change made by an artistic endeavor is the change it makes in you. The most important emotions are the ones you feel when writing that story and holding the completed work. I don't care if the AI can create something that is better than what we can create, because it cannot be changed by that creation.

— Brandon Sanderson, via Guido van Rossum

Tags: art, guido-van-rossum, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-ethics

TIL from taking Neon I at the Crucible

2026-01-11T17:35:57+00:00

TIL from taking Neon I at the Crucible

Things I learned about making neon signs after a week long intensive evening class at the Crucible in Oakland.

Tags: art, til

Quoting Christoph Niemann

2025-06-25T19:18:13+00:00

Creating art is a nonlinear process. I start with a rough goal. But then I head into dead ends and get lost or stuck.

The secret to my process is to be on high alert in this deep jungle for unexpected twists and turns, because this is where a new idea is born.

I can't make art when I'm excluded from the most crucial moments.

— Christoph Niemann, An Illustrator Confronts His Fears About A.I. Art

Tags: art, ai, generative-ai

I built an automaton called Squadron

2025-03-04T01:38:03+00:00

I believe that the price you have to pay for taking on a project is writing about it afterwards. On that basis, I feel compelled to write up my decidedly non-software project from this weekend: Squadron, an automaton.

I've been obsessed with automata for decades, ever since I first encountered the Cabaret Mechanical Theater in Covent Garden in London (there from 1984-2003 - today it's a roaming collection). If you're not familiar with them, they are animated mechanical sculptures. I consider them to be the highest form of art.

For my birthday this year Natalie signed me up for a two day, 16 hour hour weekend class to make one at The Crucible in Oakland. If you live in the SF Bay Area and are not yet aware of the Crucible I'm delighted to introduce you - it's a phenomenal non-profit art school with an enormous warehouse that teaches blacksmithing, glass blowing, welding, ceramics, woodwork and dozens of other crafts. Here's their course catalog. Go enrich your soul!

I took their class in "Mechanical Sculpture", which turned out to be exactly a class in how to make automata. I guess the term "automota" isn't widely enough known to use in the course description!

The class was small - two students and one instructor - which meant that we got an extremely personalized experience.

What I built

On day one we worked together on a class project. I suggested a pelican, and we built exactly that - a single glorious pelican that flapped its wings and swooped from side to side.

Day two was when we got to build our own things. We'd already built a pelican, but I wanted one of my own... so I figured the only thing better than a pelican is a full squadron of them!

Hence, Squadron. Here's a video of my finished piece in action:

I think it captures their pelican charisma pretty well!

How I built it

I was delighted to learn from the class that the tools needed to build simple automata are actually quite accessible:

A power drill
A saw - we used a Japanese pull saw
Wood glue
Screws
Wood - we mainly worked with basswood, plus I used some poplar wood for the wings
Brass wires and rods
Pliers for working with the wire

The most sophisticated tool we used was a reciprocating scroll saw, for cutting shapes out of the wood. We also had access to a bench sander and a drill press, but those really just sped up processes that can be achieved using sand paper and a regular hand drill.

I've taken a lot of photos of pelicans over the years. I found this side-on photograph that I liked of two pelicans in flight:

Then I used the iOS Photos app feature where you can extract an object from a photo as a "sticker" and pasted the result into iOS Notes.

I printed the image from there, which gave me a pelican shape on paper. I cut out just the body and used it to trace the shape onto the wood, then ran the wood through the scroll saw. I made three of these, not paying too much attention to accuracy as it's better for them to have slight differences to each other.

For the wings I started with rectangles of poplar wood, cut using the Japanese saw and attached to the pelican's body using bent brass wire through small drilled holes. I later sketched out a more interesting wing shape on some foam board as a prototype (loosely inspired by photos I had taken), then traced that shape onto the wood and shaped them with the scroll saw and sander.

Most automata are driven using cams, and that was the pattern we stuck to in our class as well. Cams are incredibly simple: you have a rotating rod (here driven by a 12V 10RPM motor) and you attach an offset disc to it. That disc can then drive all manner of useful mechanisms.

For my pelicans the cams lift rods up and down via a "foot" that sits on the cam. The feet turned out to be essential - we made one from copper and another from wood. Without feet the mechanism was liable to jam.

I made both cams by tracing out shapes with a pencil and then cutting the wood with the scroll saw, then using the drill press to add the hole for the rod.

The front pelican's body sits on a brass rod that lifts up and down, with the wings fixed to wires.

The back two share a single wooden dowel, sitting on brass wires attached to two small holes drilled into the end.

To attach the cams to the drive shaft I drilled a small hole through the cam and the brass drive shaft, then hammered in a brass pin to hold the cam in place. Without that there's a risk of the cam slipping around the driving rod rather than rotating firmly in place.

After adding the pelicans with their fixed wings I ran into a problem: the tension from the wing wiring caused friction between the rod and the base, resulting in the up-and-down motion getting stuck. We were running low on time so our instructor stepped in to help rescue my project with the additional brass tubes shown in the final piece.

What I learned

The main thing I learned from the weekend is that automata building is a much more accessible craft than I had initially expected. The tools and techniques are surprisingly inexpensive, and a weekend (really a single day for my solo project) was enough time to build something that I'm really happy with.

The hardest part turns out to be the fiddling at the very end to get all of the motions just right. I'm still iterating on this now (hence the elastic hair tie and visible pieces of tape) - it's difficult to find the right balance between position, motion and composition. I guess I need to get comfortable with the idea that art is never finished, merely abandoned.

I've been looking out for a good analog hobby for a while now. Maybe this is the one!

Tags: art, projects

Stimulation Clicker

2025-01-06T23:31:12+00:00

Stimulation Clicker

Neal Agarwal just created the worst webpage. It's extraordinary. All of the audio was created specially for this project, so absolutely listen in to the true crime podcast and other delightfully weird little details.

Works best on a laptop - on mobile I ran into some bugs.

Via @neal.fun

Tags: art, game-design, games

Quoting Ted Chiang

2024-08-31T22:09:15+00:00

Art is notoriously hard to define, and so are the differences between good art and bad art. But let me offer a generalization: art is something that results from making a lot of choices. […] to oversimplify, we can imagine that a ten-thousand-word short story requires something on the order of ten thousand choices. When you give a generative-A.I. program a prompt, you are making very few choices; if you supply a hundred-word prompt, you have made on the order of a hundred choices.

If an A.I. generates a ten-thousand-word story based on your prompt, it has to fill in for all of the choices that you are not making.

— Ted Chiang

Tags: art, new-yorker, ai, generative-ai, ted-chiang

Ralph Sheldon’s Portrait of Henry VIII Reidentified

2024-07-30T23:12:53+00:00

Ralph Sheldon’s Portrait of Henry VIII Reidentified

Here's a delightful two part story on art historian Adam Busiakiewicz's blog. Adam was browsing Twitter when he spotted this tweet by Tim Cox, Lord Lieutenant of Warwickshire, celebrating a reception.

He noticed a curve-framed painting mounted on a wall in the top left of the photo:

Adam had previously researched a similar painting while working at Sotheby's:

Seeing this round topped portrait immediately reminded me of a famous set of likenesses commissioned by the local politician and tapestry maker Ralph Sheldon (c. 1537--1613) for his home Weston House, Warwickshire, during the 1590s. Consisting of twenty-two portraits, mostly images of Kings, Queens and significant contemporary international figures, only a handful are known today.

Adam contacted Warwickshire County Council and was invited to Shire Hall. In his follow-up post he describes his first-hand observations from the visit.

It turns out the painting really was one of those 22 portraits made for tapestry maker Ralph Sheldon in the 1590s, long thought lost. The discovery has now made international news:

BBC News: Missing Henry VIII portrait found after random X post
Smithsonian Magazine: Art Historian Discovers Long-Lost Portrait of Henry VIII in Background of Social Media Post

Via Hacker News

Tags: art, history, twitter

Quoting Johanna Tarkela

2024-06-15T15:28:17+00:00

I understand people are upset about AI art making it to the final cut, but please try to also google artist names and compare to their portfolio before accusing them of using AI. I'm genuinely pretty upset to be accused of this. It's no fun to work on your craft for decades and then be told by some 'detection site' that your work is machine generated and people are spreading this around as a fact.

— Johanna Tarkela

Tags: art, ethics, ai, generative-ai, ai-ethics

Floor796

2023-04-10T16:59:06+00:00

Floor796

“An ever-expanding animation scene showing the life of the 796th floor of the huge space station” by Russian artist 0x00, who built their own custom browser-based pixel animation tool with which they are constructing this project. Absolutely crammed with pop culture references and easter eggs. The “Changes” link at the top shows almost daily updates, with links to jump to the latest content.

Via Hacker News

Tags: art, pixelart

Quoting Danny O'Brien

2022-12-22T21:47:46+00:00

A 4.2GiB file isn’t a heist of every single artwork on the Internet, and those who think it is are the ones undervaluing their own contributions and creativity. It’s an amazing summary of what we know about art, and everyone should be able to use it to learn, grow, and create.

— Danny O'Brien

Tags: art, danny-obrien, stable-diffusion, generative-ai

Quoting Peter Macdonald

2019-04-09T13:58:14+00:00

In the five years since the shark was erected, no other examples have occurred … any system of control must make some small place for the dynamic, the unexpected, the downright quirky. I therefore recommend that the Headington Shark be allowed to remain.

— Peter Macdonald

Tags: art

I commissioned an oil painting of Barbra Streisand’s cloned dogs

2019-03-07T15:09:18+00:00

Last year, Barbra Streisand cloned her dog, Sammie.

Two identical puffs of white fur, gazing at the tombstone of the dog they are

The story is fascinating, as is the background reading on dog cloning from Vanity Fair. But the thing that really stuck with me was the photograph that accompanied "Barbra Streisand Explains: Why I Cloned My Dog" in the New York Times:

David Ewing Duncan in Vanity Fair described the scenario like this: Barbra Streisand, visiting the grave of her beloved Sammie, with Miss Violet and Miss Scarlett perched next to her in their stroller—two identical puffs of white fur, gazing at the tombstone of the dog they are.

This photograph says so much about the age that we live in. I couldn't get it out of my head.

I've long been fascinated by Dafen, the town in a China that was once responsible for 60% of the world's oil paintings - mostly replicas, but today increasingly original artwork.

I always wanted to commission an oil painting from China, but I never quite found the right subject... until now.

There's something deliciously appropriate about using a painting cloning service to clone a photograph of some cloned dogs.

So I uploaded a copy of the photo to Instapainting and entered a few extra instructions:

Please paint the stroller closer to the gravestone - adjust the composition so that it fits the 12x16 dimensions while maintaining the two key elements of the image: the stroller with the two dogs in it and the gravestone that they are looking at

A couple of months later, a tube arrived in the mail. I opened it up... and they had nailed it. If anything the painting is an improvement on the original photograph: the composition is tighter, the stroller no longer has its wheel cut off, some dead plants in the background (which I had not even noticed) are given a bit more prominence, and the little doggy faces have exactly the right expressions of mild existential dread.

So thank you Alice Wu at Xiamen Dearchic Arts - I could not be happier.

With a painting this good, obviously it needed to be framed. I took it to Underglass Framing in San Francisco's Hayes Valley and told them I was looking for something with an air of existential dread. "I think we can do that" they said.

Natalie says I can keep it in the guest bathroom.

Tags: art, projects

Datasette: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

2018-05-09T18:38:50+00:00

Datasette: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art publish a CSV file on GitHub with details of 464,360 items from their collection. I turned it into a searchable Datasette instance.

Via @simonw

Tags: art, museums, datasette

Game developer’s guide to graphical projections (with video game examples), Part 1: Introduction

2017-12-28T01:07:36+00:00

Game developer’s guide to graphical projections (with video game examples), Part 1: Introduction

Absolutely delightful series of illustrated essays by Matej ‘Retro’ Jan explaining how different graphical projections can be used for video game art. Each concept is illustrated by screenshots or gifs from a mixture of games spanning four decades. Reading this was a real treat.

Tags: art, game-design, games, pixelart

Practical gift ideas to positively improve a friend’s life and hobbies

2016-10-13T22:34:00+00:00

My answer to Practical gift ideas to positively improve a friend’s life and hobbies on Ask MetaFilter

I'm a big fan of the Dorling Kindersley travel books, which are chock full of photos, maps, diagrams and illustrations. Thanks to the internet there's really not much point carting around a reference-style guidebook like Lonely Planet - TripAdvisor etc will always be more comprehensive and up-to-date. This makes guidebooks more important for general inspiration and browsing.

Tags: art, ask-metafilter, drawing, photography, travel, gifts, biking

Panic's lost 1982 artwork. Found.

2009-12-08T22:59:59+00:00

Panic's lost 1982 artwork. Found.

Jaw-droppingly beautiful re-imagination of Panic’s software line-up as Atari console products, complete with box art and 80’s watercolour illustrated posters.

Tags: art, atari, design, panic, retro