For this assignment, we had to create a self-portrait. As I did not hope to realistically picture myself using p5, I I went for a different approach to make the portrait relate to myself more. As I practice card magic, I decided to picture myself in a playing card, similarly how Jacks, Queens or Kings are illustrated. This meant the card has to have certain rectangular proportions, have a dividing line in the middle and have a mirror image of itself on the bottom and top halves of the card, reflecting by the axis of the dividing line. Similar to cards, the mirroring had to be done by the middle vertical axis, too. I simply had to create the individual elements of the body, such as the head, arms, eyes, mouth, then invert the x and y coordinates to mirror the elements on the opposite side of the card.
However, midway through the assignment I remembered that court cards normally hold some object in their hands, usually a royal artifact of some sort. As a magician, the most obvious thing I could hold in my self-portrait is a card itself! There began a long journey of trying to create a recursive image of me holding a card that depicts me holding a card… and so on. I had to take into account the right proportions, meaning instead of using numbers as coordinates and sizes for shapes, I had to use ratios of those numbers to the width and height of the card. I tried to make the recursion as flexible as possible, meaning that it will work on any canvas, with any number of recursions inside of the card. Currently, it works on any square canvas, where height and width are identical. I believe this can easily be fixed in future improvements, by setting the highest side of the canvas by cropping the canvas to use equal sides.
I truly enjoyed the project, partly because of the creative freedom it gives, but there are some important reflections and improvements left.
Firstly, I spent most of my time figuring out the recursion code. Even, then I only managed to create a partial recursion, where only the upper right and lower left extremes are being recursed. Moreover, the recursion effect is reached through a loop, so it is not truly a recursion yet, but I am working on perfecting it.Though, at this point, changing the loop max constraint gives a deeper recursion effect by creating more cards inside of cards.