Concept
For my self portrait assignment, I decided to go with a simple cartoon-y style. I was kind of inspired by anime style art, so I sketched out how I wanted my final result to look like on a piece of paper:
It didn’t really turn out like that sketch, but the overall idea was still followed through. I mainly used ellipses and arcs. Originally, I was going to go for just my head, but I decided to add a neck and shoulders to add a more to the self portrait element. There was a lot of guessing and adjusting with this assignment, such as the eyes and the hair. Additionally, I wanted to add some sort of interactivity, so I made the blush appear if the mouse X-position was within the face. I feel like with this, it makes it a bit more fun as opposed to just having the blush there statically.
Highlights
The part I struggled the most with was my bangs, but it turned out to be what I’m most proud of in the assignment because it took perseverance and a lot of trial and error to get it to look like the way I wanted it to. At first, I tried to use bezierVertex(), which was in the shapes section of the reference. However, it was really hard to understand where to put the points to make the shape I wanted. It also took a lot of guessing and still didn’t turn out the way I wanted.
The second method I tried was doing two ellipses for the bangs and a rectangle for my hair. I had to add another ellipse for the top of my head or else it would look like I was bald. The rectangle for my hair was perfectly fine, but I still wasn’t completely satisfied with the look and shape of my bangs.
So the final shape I tried was the arc for my bangs. I used arc for my eyebrows as well, so I feel like I should’ve done this method first but I wanted to experiment with bezierVertex(). The arcs were a bit tedious because it was a lot of guessing where each side of the bangs would be positioned. I also had to adjust the arc shape, width, and height multiple times before I got the final product.
Reflection and Future Directions
A future improvement or idea I want to incorporate is a blinking animation when the mouse is pressed. I would also like to add different facial features, such as anger or sadness. Right now, the background is also quite plain so it would be nice to add something else to it, for instance a landscape or abstract art. Overall, since I’ve done p5 in the past, this was a nice refresher and a fun assignment.