I love drawing goofy cartoon faces in my daily drawings. For this project I created software that generates unique faces by pulling from a large set of pre-drawn components. The software chooses the components for each face and arranges them based on some simple layout rules.

The system dynamically sizes each face in order to fit them into a pleasing grid for the chosen composition size. This makes it possible to generate a small grid, or an entire wall of individual personas.

The finished compositions are output as vector files which can be drawn using a pen plotter. The imperfections of the plotting process help to retain and enhance the hand-drawn quality of the source components, even though the faces are generated by a machine.

There are over 20 billion possible combinations of components, but since the system can also make adjustments to the head size, as well as the position and orientation of individual features, the number of possible faces is effectively infinite.