Make bizarre art with WordsEye

I believe WordsEye is intended to create a surreal, bizarre flavor of art.

Have you ever envisioned a great piece of art, sat down to create it and failed abysmally?

Few things are more frustrating than knowing there is a masterpiece within yourself — but you just can’t draw it (yet)! I can’t tell you how many times I have longed to be able to describe my mind’s eye to the paper, and the pictures form themselves.

There is a way now with WordsEye. Tell this Web app what you want, and it will generate it for you. In theory, at least. In my one week of experience, I have had a lot of fun and frustration with it.

Let’s start with something basic. Here’s what I wrote in WordsEye:

“The ground is dark gray. The sky is dark gray. A tiny woman is on a large moon. A tiny planet is one foot to its left.”

Here’s the result:

What you see above is not 100% a computer’s interpretation of what I wrote. I had to make some choices. I wrote “woman,” for instance, but then WordsEye presented me with some options. Which version of “woman” should I use? And hey, Jupiter’s a planet too! Using the same text in the description, the art could just have easily have been this:

(In case you’re wondering, this isn’t the masterpiece I spoke of.)

Don’t think, though, that WordsEye will magically understand what you type. You have to use very simple sentences and avoid most verbs. Fortunately, if you take a few minutes to go through the tour and look at the examples, you will have a pretty clear understanding of what you can and cannot type.

Sadly, the models you can choose for your creation are a little limited. (Much to WordsEye’s credit, though, Pluto is in the planet category.)

As of this writing, there were only 12 models that showed up for “woman,” and the selections weren’t great. A Viking opera singer with no legs. A statue. Several women holding out their arms. And had I written “dog,” I would have had 50 models to choose from!

Still, WordsEye is in beta, so it’s understandable it doesn’t have a huge selection yet. There are plenty of models there to spark your creativity right now. And you can import your own images! I integrated photos of gears and a circuit board with this picture:

I’m especially proud of that dinosaur (whom I referred to as a dragon, but it’s OK). I thought the computer chips looked rather nice on it. Sadly, that’s the only pirate I could find.

That image of mine isn’t the oddest thing created with WordsEye. I believe WordsEye is intended to create a surreal, bizarre flavor of art. Even its examples are full of trippy images, like Donald Trump kissing a fish.

Remember that time you were tripping at the dentist’s office? The WordsEye gallery is like that, but you get to keep your teeth. Check it out.

You don’t have to just create off-the-wall things. Here’s one where I strove for a degree of realism:

But it’s so much easier to make something strange.

And if you like what you make, you can put it on a T-shirt or a mug. (Commercial use is prohibited, so this is basically for fun right now.) Whatever you decide to do with it, make it weird!

If you want to see what other crazy art I come up with, follow me on WordsEye. You can also follow me on Facebook and Twitter.