INTRICATE PATTERNS can be generated on the personal computer with very compact descriptions in SMALLTALK. They are made by repeating, rotating, scaling, superposing and combining drawings of simple geometric shapes. Students who are learning to program first create interesting free-form or literal images by drawing them directly in the dot matrix of the display screen. Eventually they learn to employ the symbolic images in the programming language to direct the computer to generate more complex imagery than they could easily create by hand.