When I entered college I was not sure what I wanted to study. I remember being interested in psychology, classical history, and urban planning, but computer science was not at the front of my mind. I ended up taking an introductory course in the subject because the description mentioned something about making art. It turned out that we would be making sketches in Processing as we learned the basics of computer programming.
Our first assignment was to create a representational work using all of Processing's primitive drawing functions (ellipse, line, rectangle, etc.) at least once. I decided to create a reproduction of Vincent van Gogh's "The Bedroom" (1889). Van Gogh is my favorite artist and I wanted to do his work justice, so in order to get the piece as accurate as possible, I created a tracer program based on examples my professor had showed us in class. One loaded an image to the sketch canvas and the other printed the current mouse coordinate position to the screen. Together, I was able to load up an image of the painting and pick out the exact X, Y coordinates for all of the important compositional points in the drawing. Then I recreated the shapes in Processing using these coordinates.
I had so much fun working on this assignment. I remember spending hours and hours on it and completely losing track of time. That being said, when our professor informed us in the next lecture that there was such a thing as 'variables' and 'functions,' I was so shocked. "How could you not have told us this before? I could have saved so much time if I knew about variables! I could have made a stamp function to draw out another chair!" I thought. These thoughts were quickly replaced by "What else is out there? What else can I make?" and I've been figuring those out ever since.