DrawCompileEvolve: Sparking Interactive Evolutionary Art with Human Creations

This paper presents DrawCompileEvolve, a web-based drawing tool which allows users to draw simple primitive shapes, group them together or define patterns in their groupings (e.g. symmetry, repetition). The user’s vector drawing is then compiled into an indirectly encoded genetic representation, which can be evolved interactively, allowing the user to change the image’s colors, patterns and ultimately transform it. The human artist has direct control while drawing the initial seed of an evolutionary run and indirect control while interactively evolving it, thus making DrawCompileEvolve a mixed-initiative art tool. Early results in this paper show the potential of DrawCompileEvolve to jump-start evolutionary art with meaningful drawings as well as the power of the underlying genetic representation to transform the user’s initial drawing into a different, yet potentially meaningful, artistic rendering.