These excerpts are from a response to a reader on the wonderful tumblr by Jerome Herr, Experiments In Processing.

Learning to code is like learning a natural language: it’s quite hard and slow at first but if you hold on just a little then suddenly you start seeing all the beauty of it and you’re amazed about how you suddenly understand what’s going on and how you can create stuff (designs or sentences) on your own!

Start with something that you understand and then, VERY IMPORTANT, play with it! What I often do is that I simply add a new instruction, maybe one from a previous tutorial or sketch, to see how that will look. Or I wonder: what will the animation look like if I use very big ellipses? or very small ones? only 10 of them? or a 1000? What if I make this rectangles rotate a bit? A lot? What if I apply this to only some of them?

So it’s not just about staring at the screen. It’s also about sketching stuff on paper and about letting yourself be inspired by everything you see in the world around you! Look at all the patterns that you can see in the natural world, day in and day out: in buildings, on the sidewalks, in the behaviour of cars or birds. Try to recreate those patterns. Start with the easy ones, obviously 😉 Look at Muslim art, lots of patterns to be found there. Or the art of Sol Levitt. And go to art museums, they can be very inspiring anyway!