An art game you can play for free
Composition is a painting you make by playing. Each line you draw splits the canvas. Each space you close without a dot inside fills with colour. The painting is done when three quarters of the canvas is filled. No two paintings come out the same, because each one is made of your choices: where you drew, when, and which spaces you left white.
How to make a Mondrian-style painting
Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) was a Dutch painter. His best-known paintings, from the 1920s on, use only a few simple parts. You can make one in four steps, on paper or on the canvas above:
- Start with a white canvas. The white is part of the painting, not empty space.
- Divide the canvas with straight lines. Draw strong lines across and down, so the canvas splits into rectangles of different sizes.
- Colour a few rectangles. Fill some with red, yellow or blue, and leave most of them white.
- Balance, don’t copy. Let a small block of strong colour balance a big white space, instead of making both sides the same.
Many of his paintings are called Composition, plus their colours, like “Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow” (1930). Our game’s name is a nod to those titles.
Mondrian art for kids and classrooms
This makes a good ten-minute art lesson. Let each child paint one canvas here. Then put a few paintings side by side and ask: which one feels balanced, and why? Where did the colour end up, and how much white is left? Children quickly see that the same few rules make very different pictures. There’s no account to make, no ads, and nothing to buy, and the page works on classroom computers and iPads.
Not a generator: a game
A Mondrian generator makes a random picture for you. Here, nothing appears unless you made it happen. The lines are yours, the timing is yours, and a dot that slips through breaks the line you were drawing. That small challenge is why the finished painting feels like yours.
Keep your paintings in the app
On iPhone and iPad, every painting you finish is kept in your own gallery, with the name the game gives it. There’s a new board every day and sixty more to work through. You can also paint one canvas together with a friend or your child, taking turns. The app works offline and has no ads.