Bucket Art – Venkatesh Rao

Bucket Art

A mini-project of digital paintings made with Autodesk Sketchbook on iPad/Pencil in October/November 2025. I call it bucket art because the main tool is the fill tool (usually a bucket icon in painting programs). The technique starts with laying down an interesting base layer using grids, textured brushes, patterns of random strokes, and trying to spot interesting image possibilities. I then add some more appropriate scaffolding and then use the fill tool to tease out the possibilities. The trick is to lay down a base layer that interacts well with the fill algorithm (playing with the fill tolerance is critical here). The technique started out as a couple of idle doodles in a notebook during a long meeting that inspired the digital technique. The original doodles as well as the base layer approach are in the first gallery image.

Most are loosely representatitional or figurative, but there are a few abstract ones too, which are really studies where I worked out techniques. Some motifs -- ships, waterfalls, skylines -- proved easy to generate in reliably repeatable ways. One impulse behind this project was to explore an approach to protocol art, via a tension between human seeing/pareidolia and algorithmic "painting kernels" (like the fill tool, grid tool, and texture tool). Another goal was to try and "see like an image generator" using low-level kernels of the sort used by AI image generators, such as diffusion and stochastic field primitives. I plan to use these images to train an image generator and see if it picks up on the underlying protocol.

A more high-concept name for this style might be Generative Impressionism, where the goal is to recognize familiar things emerging in a stochastic ontogenic process governed by the strange rules of a latent space.