De Blob

Concept:

Instead of going with my actual face I decided to make a video game character. Blob is a character from the game called De Blob, and I felt like this character has left an impact on me since I was a child and represented me better than my face ever will. The character,  Blob is a round blob that absorbs color and goes around putting color back into a world that’s been drained of color by an evil corporation and I felt like its a good character to pick for my first assignment even since I started with nothing but a blank canvas with no color and have to build everything up myself.

And he was also a pretty good fit for the assignment itself. He’s almost entirely made up of circles and rectangles and had and was easy to draw or get an idea of how to draw him. I used alot of ellipses, rectangles, quads, etc.

Highlighted Code:

// Smile

fill('#fffafa');
ellipse(250, 295, 190, 105);
fill('#c53127');
ellipse(250, 245, 202, 82);

I think one my favorites to tweak with or the most interesting one in my opinion is the smile itself. Because I made it by removing the shape instead of drawing it, I drew a big white ellipse, then a second one in the body color directly ontop of it and then made it so the second ellipse eats up the top half of the white one and whats left under it is the grin.

// Jelly from the inside of the body

fill('#c53127');
ellipse(250, 200, 196, 104);
rect(152, 200, 196, 170);
ellipse(250, 367, 196, 94);
fill('#bd3026');
ellipse(163, 306, 34, 150);
fill('#c23026');
ellipse(341, 303, 27, 145);

The other part I liked is the darker crimson jelly that filled him and make it like he’s actually a Blob and not just like a red thing. Essentially what I did is a darker red over the body and I did it in three pieces I did a rounded top, I did one straight down the middle and the rounded out bottom so the fill follows the body’s shape and isn’t just a flat out rectangle.

I think what I really want to point at though are the last two ellipses, they are tall and narrow and tucked against the left and right edges so they make it look curved instead of just flat.

I think what I learned from this was how connected these layers are actually are, how to put them one over the other properly. Like even while I was doing this I broke something so when I was filling the jelly fill to fill out the rest of the body it broke the the grin so it broke the smile and just showed up as a pale band across his face this was because the thing that carved the smile was still the old lighter red and the fix was just recoloring it to make it match the new fill instead of the old one.

How was this made?

Honestly at the start I didnt really have anything but just a rectangle and to lines at the top coming out of it for the ears and I was just kind of building the base and at that point it looked nothing like him.

I used a reference image and started to get to work and needed the body to become a bit rounder at the top and bottom and so I decided to built it out of a rectangle and I made it also with an ellipse on each end making the top and bottom look more squashed and blob like.

The biggest thing I had to learn while doing this is the order of things, I worked everything kind of like when your actually painting something so I put the shadow on the ground first like I had in my reference picture, then everything that was like behind the body or like poking out like the arms and the hands and the ears then the body andthen the face last. Honestly most of my bugs came from that, like a few times a shape I spent like so many minutes trying to position just completely disappeared and every single time its because I put something over it without thinking.

For the shapes themselves, the body and the hands and like the shading of it are all ellipses and rectangles and the arms and the fingers are quads because I needed shapes that could be kind of angled instead of just rectangles and the peace sign for the fingers are quads. Then the wink I used it like how you, the Professor, showed us in class by using an arc and I used PI and TWO_PI to get a half circle and its the only arc in the whole sketch the rest honestly is ellipses, rectangles or quad.

Reflection:

Honestly I’m pretty happy with how this came out with my first time using p5js for like an assignment and stuff it came out a lot closer to the reference image than I expected when I first started off. I think the most satisfying part of all this was just like seeing it all come together and starting to actually see the thing I envisioned and the thing I’m making become recognizable because for the longest time it was just a red rectangle with sticks coming out of it on top andthen the eyes, then the grin, then the wink, then the peace sign andthen it was clearly him.

I think if I wanted to add anything in the future I think I’d want to make him move somehow like his ears swaying back and forth and make it so De Blob isn’t naturally winking at first but when they click the screen he winks and maybe it plays like a sound or something. And maybe a way to make it so he changes color every second because he absorbs any color around him or make it so the user picks what color he’d want De Blob to be from an RGB perspective.