# Images & Pixels as Arrays

**Track:** Foundations — Creative Coding — the existing 50
**Framework / surface:** p5.js
**Level:** Intermediate
**Prerequisites:** Arrays, Nested Loops & Grids

**In one line:** An image is a grid of colours your code can read and rewrite.

## Theory, aesthetics & inspiration

A digital image is a two-dimensional array of colors — a grid of samples that code can read, copy, and rewrite pixel by pixel. To see the picture as data is to gain the power to transform it arithmetically rather than by hand. The intuition is old: Georges Seurat's pointillism built images from discrete touches of color the eye integrates at distance, and Chuck Close's gridded portraits made the cell itself the subject. Raster graphics formalized this discretization for the machine. Aesthetically, treating pixels as numbers dissolves the boundary between image and process — a photograph becomes raw material, sampled and resynthesized, and any rule applied across the grid becomes a way of seeing.