Concept
For this project, I wanted to focus on representing myself using colors and shapes to convey my personality, rather than just creating an exact lifelike image. I chose bright pastel colors because they represent this sense of calm, warmth, and playfulness, which are qualities I believe reflect who I am as a person. In terms of the layout, I kept the features rather minimalist, with curves and lines to form a slight sense of structure without making the portrait overly complicated. I used shapes like circles, ellipses, and rectangles to mimic facial features.
Code Highlight
One of the parts of the code that I am proud of is how I created the hair. At first, I was going to use a simple rectangle to represent the hair. However, as I started to mess with the shapes, I noticed that circles and ellipses would work well to create the flowing, softish texture of hair, and I ended up combining these shapes with rounded rectangles to create this illusion.
Here’s the code:
//hair
fill(0, 0, 0);
rect(107.5, 189, 185, 125, 35);
ellipse(200, 203, 185, 250, 150);
fill("black");
circle(120, 168, 50);
circle(280, 168, 50);
circle(280, 168, 50);
//bangs
push();
fill("black");
rotate(75);
ellipse(100, 202, 120, 50, 70);
rotate(-75);
ellipse(235, 147, 95, 54, 70);
ellipse(235, 130, 70, 54, 70);
pop();
Ideas for Future Work/Improvements
Looking ahead, I have a lot of ideas for how I could improve this portrait. First, I’d love to animate different aspects of the portrait, so maybe animate the hair to give the illusion that it’s blowing in the wind, or make the eyes blink or shift to make the portrait feel more dynamic. I could also include more interactive features, like making the background change colors based on the position of the mouse.
Another area I may want to explore is the use of textures. For this project I stuck with solid pastel colors, however I think adding subtle textures to the background or hair could create a more layered and interesting visual effect. I could experiment with gradients, patterns, or even incorporate some visual noise to make the composition feel slightly more textured.