Valentine's Day Algorithmic Art Workshop

A workshop for Purdue Hackers!

Roses are red, VSCode is blue... 💘

​ Purdue Hackers is hosting a Valentine’s Day Algorithmic Art Workshop!

You'll use code to generate heart-fluttering visuals and procedural patterns to create a digital Valentine's Day card with no prior experience required!

​By the end, you’ll leave with a digital valentine made of math and love <3 Join our Discord server: https://puhack.horse/discord !

What's a workshop?

Workshops are our way to introduce folks to the magic of Purdue Hackers! Participants go through a short guided coding session, and then remix and hack their own modifications to make the project their own!

Overview

This workshop covers implementing the algorithm by József Fejes; I found it a few years ago while reading Yuri Vishnevsky's beautiful blog post about making business cards with it. The algorithm fills a canvas by:

1. Starting from a seed point.
2. Iterating through a shuffled list of colors.
3. For each color, placing it next to an already-placed color that is most similar.

Example output (run with four seeds in all four corners.)

Workshop photos!

This workshop took place on 11 Feb 2026.

Quick Start

Press .on this Github page to launch a Github Codespace environment. The project has been tested to run on their default container image (which has Python pre-installed.)

Dependencies

• Python 3.10+
• NumPy
• Pillow
• Flask (for web preview)

Usage

python cli.py --rgb
python cli.py --image in/water_lilies_monet.jpg -o result.png

Web Preview

python web_preview.py

Then open http://localhost:5000 in your browser.

Command-line Options

Option	Description
--rgb	Generate uniform RGB cube (256×128)
--image PATH	Load colors from image
-o, --output FILE	Output filename (default: output.png)