Procedural Cartoon Faces 2016-02-06

While doodling and brainstorming, trying to think of something else to draw with my XY plotter, I thought about generating random eyes.

I started by generating a random ellipse for the eye outline and another random ellipse for the pupil. Of course, these all looked like boobs, so I decided to add a nose (yet another ellipse). It started looking better, so then I added an arc for the mouth.

I generated several such random faces and placed them in a grid. I'm quite pleased with the result and I'll probably try more variations on this theme soon.

Probably my favorite part are the "mistakes." Sometimes the pupils go outside of the eyes, and the eyes become more like a pair of eyebrows. Sometimes the mouth is so close to the nose, it looks more like a mustache. When the eyes intersect the nose, it looks like a pair of eyeglasses. So I left these quirks in intentionally.

I think this exercise also shows that even something quite simple can produce fun and interesting results.