CONCEPT
For this assignment, I was inspired by sketching in Adobe Illustrator. One way of making complex figures in Illustrator is by drawing lots of intersecting ellipses to outline the figure that you want to build. At the intersection of those ellipses, you get irregular shapes, which will help you in achieving the organic feel in your final drawing. You then reach for the Shape Builder Tool to connect the wanted areas at the intersection of the ellipses. Even before using this tool, you can already see the outline of your figure peeking through the bunch of ellipses.
In my work, I wanted to achieve this rough sketch feel and imitate the way I draw regularly (on paper or in Illustrator).
IMPLEMENTATION
My code was pretty repetitive. The order in which the shapes are placed is important, so I have started by writing in comments all the portrait parts that I need to add in a particular order. I then call for random color with random opacity, choose the angle of rotation, and draw the shape. This process is repeated for each part of the portrait. As a code it looked like the snippet below:
//jaw fill(random(0,255), random(0,255), random(0,255), random(0,255)); // fill(249, 213, 192, 130); translate(width / 2, height / 2); rotate(120); ellipse(20, 20, 150, 200);
The most challenging part of the implementation was figuring out the angle of rotation for each shape. It didn’t rotate in the way that I would imagine it to. The one-degree difference could make the shape do an actual 180-degree turn on the sketch. I’ll ask for more clarification regarding this issue during the class. Perhaps, it was an easy fix.
REFLECTION
I like the way my sketch ended up. It reminds me of stained glass window drawings that I did with gel paint as a kid. It kind of also gives me cubism vibes. Some random color pallets work better than others, perhaps, I could work on limiting the randomness of colors next time.