A birthday present for Picasso
Pablo Picasso was born in Málaga on 25 October 1881, 145 years ago today. Since 2004 his birthday has also been International Artist Day. We wanted to mark it with something you can play with, not just read about.
The idea
Cubism's big trick was showing something from several viewpoints at once: break the subject into planes, shift them, and let one eye look at you while the nose turns away. That trick turns out to work very well as a photo booth. The Cubist Booth does it to any picture you give it, in the colours of seven Picasso periods.
Around the booth: a name-seeded portrait generator that also gives you a 20-word Picasso-style name, a quote game (most of the famous Picasso quotes online aren't his), a period quiz, and an interactive timeline of his 92 years.
How the booth works
- Recolour. The picture is auto-levelled, then every pixel's brightness is mapped onto the chosen period's palette: blues for the Blue Period, terracottas for Proto-Cubism, greys for Guernica. Late Riviera maps colours by hue instead.
- Shatter. The canvas is cut over and over by random straight lines, always splitting the biggest piece and favouring the centre where the face usually is, until it reaches the number of shards you chose.
- Shift. Each shard redraws the picture with its own small shift, rotation and zoom. With “second viewpoint” turned up, some shards show the mirrored far side of the subject, which is how you get two eyes from two angles.
- Paint. Each plane gets light on one edge and shadow on the other, plus period texture: hatching for Analytic Cubism, newsprint, wood grain and dots for Synthetic collage, short black ticks for Guernica. Then ink outlines, canvas grain and your signature go on top.
Everything runs on a seeded random number generator, so the same settings always give the same painting. That's how a shared link can rebuild exactly what the sender saw (with the built-in sitters; photos are never put in links).
Privacy
Your photos and camera feed are processed in your browser and never uploaded anywhere. There's no server, no account, no analytics and no trackers. The studio wall, your best quiz score, your last name portrait and your theme are kept in your browser's local storage and stay on your device. Clear them any time with the “Clear wall” button or your browser settings.
A note on Picasso's paintings
Picasso's works are still under copyright, so we don't reproduce any of them here. Every image on this site is generated from scratch: the booth's sitters are drawn in code, and the portraits are built from shapes. The period palettes are our own interpretations. This is an independent tribute, not affiliated with or endorsed by the Picasso estate or any museum.
Sources
- Wikipedia — Pablo Picasso (birth, full name, periods, major works, Mona Lisa questioning, Guernica, relationships)
- Wikiquote — Pablo Picasso (sourced, disputed and misattributed quotes)
- Quote Investigator — Good artists copy; great artists steal, Every child is an artist, Computers are useless, “It has taken me forty years”, The purpose of life is to discover your gift
- Barry Popik — “Inspiration does exist, but it must find you working”
- Picasso Administration — “To create is to resist” (1945 interview in Les Lettres françaises)
- Guinness World Records — Most prolific painter and Most expensive painting by Picasso sold at auction
- Smithsonian Magazine — Femme à la montre sells for $139 million
- BIE — Guernica at Expo 1937
- National Day Calendar — International Artist's Day
Credits
Designed and built for dailyma.de, a new small website every day. Typefaces: Syne, Work Sans and Caveat via Google Fonts. No other libraries.