Project #4 Exquisite Corpse

Description

Exquisite Corpse is an art practice where two or more drawings are combine creating a new different painting. Nobody knows the final result, but it is a lot of fun and very creative. For this project, I worked with Oliver Bruckner and Sarah Nichols. Previously, each one draw a character that included head, arms, torso, and legs. Then we divided the bodies in three parts and choose a part to draw in code. Each character has a background story, and as a result of the new character I created a new background story.

The background story of this new character is that Al-Home Favorites, was born as the recolection of the favorite parts of a comfort zone, where nobody can disturb, but one day, Al-Home Favorites went out to meet friends and found Pigeon the sailor who wanted to explore the world, and with little bear who likes to cook. The three of them became great friends and they found in each other streghts than the other one didn't have, so they share those and became new people, now Al-Home Favorites walks with the power of the legs of Pigeon the Sailor, and cooks with the agile memory of the little bear.

Background Story

Oliver created Pigeon the sailor, was always eager to discover the world. Swallow — a high school friend — always told amazing stories about “the south”, where Swallow’s family always went during winter. These stories fascinated Pigeon until eventually the decision was made to become a sailor on a cargo ship. Now the day to day life is filled with containers, the sea, and, most importantly, many new places to discover. Hamburg, Rotterdam, or Shanghai are just a few of the harbors that showed the potential for many new cultures, that Pigeon has not seen before. Sailing through the world, Pigeon fell in love with life at sea. A true “seapigeon”, one could say.

Sarah created My little bear character lives on a hill next to a house with a rabbit character in it. He lives far away from his family and works at home. He is an avid gardener and cook but is a bit afraid of the outside world. He tries his best to make friends and will often make food for them, but is easily overwhelmed when dealing with new people. His dream is to have a big garden and maybe make friends with the outgoing rabbit next door.

“Al-Home Favorites”, it’s made from different parts of my favorite things that I have at home. "Al-Home Favorites” was inspired by pieces of my turntable, the colors of my favorite painting, parts of a necklace that I received as a gift from my uncle, the patterns of a rug that my cat loves, and the patterns of my plant pots. Al-Home Favorites is an expression of the things that are in my comfort zone and I enjoy day by day.

Design Process

I separate by sections my drawing, this way I was able to call the functions and organized my code. Each part of the drawing is a function, the head, the eyes, the body, and so on. I call the functions on function draw. then on each function that represent a part of the body, I added 2D primitive shapes and color, or I used curveVertex in more complex shapes. This took a while specially because it was hard to find the correct coordinates with certain shapes. To ease the process of possitioning each shape I used function mouseClicked. The design of each part of the character took a while but once was done, it was easy to add some parameters, I added those at the end. I used parameters to add color on the bear cheaks by setting the value when I called the function to later define the function and complete the cheaks shape. Addtionally, using a similar process to the cheaks, I added movement to the body, playing with translate and with map I was able to move the body, but the body wasn't returning to its original position, so I used 'modulo' this is very new to me, I found it by pure casuallity, because it is on the syllabus and I checked how it works. Modulo helped to make the movement possible.

Reflection

I enjoyed discovering how the character was appearing in the canvas, but what I found challenging was the complicated shapes, I wish was an easier way to create them. I understand the code was long because of the amount of points that the draw has, but I think if I can file some of my code in folders, the code will look even more organize.

Also, I realized that I shouldn't add 'translate' at the draw function, I could do it, if necessary, on each functions for each part of the body. Finally, I found extremely helpful in terms of structure and organization to separate the draw in functions, it was easier to add parameters, I could add different parameters or conditions on each part of the draw since all of them are independent of each other.