Can You Tell Free Python Art from Multi-Million Dollar Pieces?
One of these pieces has been generated by Python and the rest are Piet Mondrian originals. Which one is the odd one out? I'll give you the answer a few paragraphs down but first I need to tell you why I am using Python for Art generation and not a fancy Gen-AI tool.
As a creative art enthusiast born with zero artistic skills, I saw the launch of DALL-E and others as the opportunity to cover my entire flat in "my" masterpieces without needing to master a brush.
That wasn't the case and my walls remain a blank canvas. I didn't manage to create anything display-worthy, but most importantly – DALL-E killed the vibe.
Why?
Because most of the magic in art comes from feeling our way through the creative process. It's a journey – not just an outcome. AI art felt too dictated, too random, and too cold for me.
So that got me thinking: is there a sweet middle spot? Is there a way to have random but controlled generative art and still get that dopamine/pride moment of a finished piece? And needless to say, without actual artistic skills?
In this article I will show you how I created two museum-worthy art pieces, and we will uncover which is the Mondrian impostor.
How to create Piet Mondrian fakes
For my first Generative Art piece, I've taken inspiration from Piet Mondrian, a pioneer of abstract art. His work is presented as an abstract arrangement of lines, colours and shapes.
Here is a little sample of some of his most iconic pieces:
Do you know which one is the impostor already?
If you're interested in giving it a try, you just have to install the "mondrian-maker" Python package to paint new pieces like this:
The mondrian-maker package was created by Andrew Bowen and is published under a GNU General Public License.
from mondrian_maker.mondrian import mondrian
m = mondrian()
m.make_mondrian()
Part of the fun is that a new piece will be generated every time you call make_mondrian(). Not all of them will be "painting-worthy" so I generated 100 and chose my favourites.
for i in range(0,100):
f,ax=m.make_mondrian()
f.savefig(f"{i}_mondrian.png")And the answer to the Python or original game? The impostor is the third one from the left
