Create Awesome Physics-Based Art with Kinetic Sketch

image: Anonymous

There are lots of free online art tools, and lots of free online physics simulations. There are very few online tools that combine the two ideas, and fewer still that do it as well as Kinetic Sketch.

Kinetic Sketch is a website that went live earlier this week, providing a drawing tool that’s a lot of fun to use and that allows you to make really interesting and attractive art. You create different kinds of shapes in colors based on a user-chosen pallette (which can even be based around photographs from Flickr), and you can control how the shapes interact with each other. The tool lets you adjust gravity (even its direction) and change the way the tool determines how big to make each shape. When you’ve completed your masterpiece, you can save it to the site’s gallery and/or post it directly to Flickr, Twitter, or Facebook.

It’s probably a pretty decent tool to help teach kids a bit about how slight changes to physical properties can make huge differences in end results, but mostly it’s just a heck of a lot of fun to play with. Some of the images in the gallery, too, are very attractive, as you can see in the example above.

Check out the video below for more about how Kinetic Sketch works.

(via MetaFilter)