Concept
For my self portrait I wanted something that represented a few aspects of my personality in ways that I don’t normally think about them. I tried to think of puns/inside jokes within my life that would add to the self portrait both visually and conceptually. I also knew that I wanted to add some interactive component/movement in the portrait but was unsure as to what exactly I wanted when I got started.
Components
To walk you through some of these components lets starts with the most obvious, the color changing background and sun-emoji mouse. I am a visiting student from New York, and have spent the last 10 years in Harlem, NYC but am originally from Florida. Florida is often referred to as “the Sunshine State” and although I consider myself a New Yorker, still believe that being born there is important to who I am. I found implementing the color tracking background components and sunshine mouse to be relatively simple but spent a lot of time working on this piece because of the color theory aspect. I had a very difficult time match the colors of the background to a “Floridian sunrise” but ended up on settling with this blue (representing night) to orange (daytime) transition.
let c = color(mouseX-200, 100, 100); background(c);
//sun
textSize(48);
text("☀️", mouseX, mouseY);
An aspect I am proud of
Another component I would like to highlight is the camera/flash feature. A big hobby of mine if film photography so I thought I’d add in a little camera around my neck to capture some beautiful scenery. I added the flash mainly because I wanted something interactive but also thought of it as a joke because I am quite bad at taking photos with flash. Although this code is also quite simple, it is what I would like to highlight as what I am particularly proud of because I had quite a bit of difficulty trying to get it to work. I was having a lot of trouble distinguishing the uses between mousePressed(), mouseClicked(), and mouseIsPressed() but ended up solving the problem by finding a tutorial on the click-event feature.
//camera flash
if (mouseIsPressed){
//referenced vidianindhita's tutorial
noStroke();
fill('white');
ellipse(380, 550, 50, 50);
}
My final product
Reflection
All in all, I really enjoyed this assignment and was excited to work with something new. I found manipulating the shapes to make different images more difficult than I expected it to be and enjoyed the challenge of trying to figure out what shapes could make what facial features. In the future, I would like to fix the color issue with the sunrise because I think it is a super cool feature that just needs a bit of tinkering. I’d also like to try and figure out what other dynamic pieces I could add. For instance maybe moving clouds or a sun that rises on it’s own without the mouse. Also, I did attempt to track my pupils onto the mouse within the parameters of the whites of my eyes but didn’t make much progress so hopefully I can figure that out too.