ABSTRACT
For many years, people have enjoyed crafts like pottery wheels, Spirographs, Mad Libs, spin art, paper marbling, and tie-dye. These artistic toys helped everyday people make interesting artworks by producing surprising and emergent results from simple choices. Generative art toys can use many of the same techniques as procedural generation, but do not have the same gameplay-based restrictions as content that has to go into a game. Art toys are also a good way to explore new kinds of generative methods, or to try out old favorites in a new context. Digital art toys are beloved because they help people discover the artists in themselves. The central idea behind an art toy is that the user is trading away control and gaining power. Inputs can be anything from simple keyboard input or scroll wheels, to touchscreen and mouse-dragging or tablet pens. Leap Motion returns the hands as several arrays of positions. Hence, there are many aesthetics available for art toys.
