I started by experimenting with the shapes and trying out what I could do with them. I went along with what I thought looked good and came up with this:
I then looked at the previous self-portraits done by students in this course and in the p5js website. I made a list of things I found cool and wanted to incorporate or explore. This is my list:
- try automating something
- add a thing that interacts with mouse movements
- try an interesting style
- pick visually pleasing colors
- Rounded edges
I first tried to see if I can generate hair within a certain range automatically. I used a for loop that creates arcs and used the random function to generate numbers within a certain X and Y range, I also used the random number to pick an index from a list of colors so that the hair is in different colors. I tried a few strips of hair to see what changing different things would do.
In class when we were playing with moving ellipses I used that for loop and while experimenting with generating many circles at random places this happened and thought it looked similar to worn-out old pictures where the corners have changed color/faded like this:
I didn’t like the way the hair looked so I didn’t end up using that, and started sketching characters in different styles and noted things I liked about each one. I picked a color palette that felt vintage and faded.
I implemented the sketch in p5js and experimented with hair/no hair and decided without hair (I might try to implement a similar one with hair, but I didn’t like it here).
I wanted to add some animation/mouse interaction so I thought I might let it close its eyes if the mouse passes over them, but after adding the background (the for loop generated ellipses) the mode felt eerie so I decided to let it open its eyes when the mouse passes over its eyes, the background darkens, and the mouth opens.
reflection:
I really enjoyed working on this project and exploring p5js.
I think it would be interesting to explore allowing the user to alter the character (add hair? change eye size? color?)
it would also be interesting to experiment with other styles.