My concept:
This week my mind has been heavy with news from home. There are protests happening in my country, and instead of bringing hope, some of them have turned destructive. Bad actors disguised as protesters are setting fire to public property, using a genuine Gen-Z movement against corruption as cover to erase their own crimes. Several police stations were burned, letting prisoners escape. Thousands of criminals are now roaming free, which makes me constantly worry about my family’s safety.
This piece of art is my response to that chaos. The base of the picture shows fire representing the burning buildings and the anger on the streets. Above it, thick smoke rises and spreads, like the dark energy that hangs over everything. In the middle there’s a shape that at first was meant to be drifting smoke, but as I worked, it began to look like a person. So later I decided to embrace that.
That smoky figure stands for the opportunists, the gangs, and the political players who twist the protest for their own gain. Just like smoke, their hearts are gray. They walk on fire because they don’t fear destruction; they only care about their own benefit, even as the country suffers.
Through this piece I wanted to capture both the physical reality of fires and smoke and the deeper feeling of a society clouded by selfishness and violence.
After I thought I was done with the art I started to read The Art of Interactive Design. This made me see that an earlier sketch I had made felt dull and not interactive at all. I removed the original smoke class and all its elements and began drawing the parliament building once Asia’s most luxurious and one of the largest palaces before it was destroyed by fire. I worked to mimic its structure and sweeping rooflines.
For the interactive element, when a viewer clicks on the building, the flames stop and a wash of blue appears, symbolizing calm and happiness. Releasing the click reignites the fire. Each time I clicked to halt the burning, I felt a rush of conflicting emotions an almost physical wish that I could do the same in real life, to save the parliament and, in some way, my country itself.
Process and Reflection:
When I first started this piece, I pictured thick smoke clouds spreading across the top of the canvas. I spent a long time trying to build that effect by dropping bubble after bubble, checking their spots with console.log(mouseX, mouseY), and trying to make the shapes feel alive. But after a while it turned into a slow, repetitive task. The more I worked, the less it looked like the smoky sky I had imagined.
In the middle of that frustration, something unexpected happened. One cluster of bubbles began to form a faint human shape. At first I thought it was just a glitch in my layout, but the longer I looked, the more it felt right. It reminded me of how, in real life, people with hidden motives were blending into the protests. That was the moment the “smoke man” was born.
The background went through a similar transformation. I had started with a grayish color to match the idea of smoke, but the fire didn’t stand out. On a whim I tried a deep black, and suddenly the flames glowed with an intensity that felt closer to the real scene. Black made the fire look alive, and it captured the mood of a night filled with tension and danger when prisoners were set free.
Looking back, the way this piece evolved feels close to the story I wanted to tell. Plans I was sure about like a full smoky sky kept falling apart, and new shapes kept appearing out of nowhere. The smoke man, which began as a small accident, became the heart of the artwork, just like how unexpected figures can change the course of a protest.
If I had more time, I would push the scene even further: let the smoke drift and curl like real fumes, add buildings, maybe even small moving figures to suggest the chaos on the ground. But even without those details, this process showed me how art sometimes leads rather than follows. What started as a careful plan turned into a piece shaped by chance, change, and the very uncertainty I was trying to capture.
My Sketch: