Week #1 self_portrait

Concept

For this assignment, I chose to draw my favorite cartoon character “Luo xiaohei”, a black cat, as my spiritual character. At first, I was quite indecisive on which character best represents me as a self-portrait, but as I tried to look around, I just saw my xiaohei keychain and found myself thinking of how relatable (and adorable) he is. To fully utilize the skills acquired during class, and even further challenge myself, I decided to draw him being annoyed, where he would frown and his eyelids become slanted, forcing me to experiment/practice more with the arc function.

Some code that I’m really proud: 

The front legs where I did multiple experiments with the arc diameter, width, and height! 

//legs
  arc(225, 353, 90, 170, PI, PI+QUARTER_PI);
  arc(210,350,90,170,PI+HALF_PI+QUARTER_PI,0);
  arc(183,356,64,160,PI+HALF_PI+QUARTER_PI,0);
  arc(251.5,353, 64, 163, PI, PI+QUARTER_PI);

As well as the ears, where I kept on experimenting with layers and arc values (as you can see the complex PI values, the QUARTER_PI/8, and the green part last)

//ears
 arc(270,175,90,130,PI+HALF_PI+QUARTER_PI/8, 0);
 arc(279,141,50,60,PI,PI+HALF_PI);
 arc(160,147,130,60,PI+HALF_PI,0);
 fill('#c1f0b7')
 arc(165,187,49,140, PI, PI+HALF_PI);

Embedded Sketch

How this was made

I started the assignment by drawing the sky and grass. Because Xiaohei is a young cat, he’s pretty small, so I made the grass section bigger than the sky to create this lower vision point. Originally, I started drawing the head first like how I’d usually do, but then realized drawing the head first makes drawing the torso difficult because I used arcs for the torso and it’d create a “hill” on top of the head, so I switched order and made the torso drawn first and then other body parts, so the torso could be “covered” and things would look more natural. After I was done with the body, I began to do the tail, where I gradually practiced my arc functions.

I drew the tail in 3 sections: one half oval for the tail connected to the body; one half circle as the tail turn; one half oval for tail end.

Then I began drawing the eyes and ears. With the eyes, I first drew 2 slanted lines for the “frown” and then experimented with the pupil and “white” part of the eyes in the way they are tilted. After I’m done figuring out the tiltness, I switched the order of the line and the eye part to make things more natural. Same applied to the ears: I kept experimenting with the width, height, and arc angles.

I referenced this picture “Xiaohei“ and also sought help from the p5js reference library “reference library”

Reflection and future improvements

I think one thing I could do better in the future is perhaps draft out the parts of the drawing and dissect the parts into orders of layers (which gets to drawn first and which last), so I can make the process a bit smoother, in the sense that I wouldn’t need to spend the time on that but rather on the finer details like the angle of the eyes and ears.

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