Exquisite Corpse

My partners for this assignment were Jingwen Zhang and Jiujin Feng.

Process/Reflection

Both Joan and Juijin's designs were adorable and had equally fun backstories. Joan's illustration is of a character's design from a cartoon, and coincidentally reminded me a bit of Earthbound's starman. Jiujin's illustration was of a selectable profile picture on the Nintendo Switch, redrawn and simplified in Illustrator. My own sketch was a piecemeal collection of triangles, one wearing a toothed mask, complete with countless spindly legs (as with any good Lovecraftian horror). I was given Joan's head and Jiujin's legs to work with for the sketch, leaving me with a small, friendly character far cuter than anything I could've designed.

The design process, given the short final code that makes up the finished product, was an exhausting 2 day run of trial and error. Joan's head is a rounded triangle, a shape not native to P5 that required a great deal of jury-rigging to complete. Initially, I used a beginShape() function to draw a triangular head vertex-by-vertex, but the curveVertex() argument was so extraordinarily confounding I elected to take the approach I used for the final sketch. The character's head is made of two bezier curves that intersect with each other with the goal of creating a continuous shape, with matching fill() values to differentiate the head from the rest of the sketch. The character's eyes were simple enough and were the first things I made for the sketch as a whole.

The body, of my own design, also proved to be a bit of a headache. The general design is a triangle with 3 embedded triangles, all set relative to a single. I added a scalar value to be able to resize the body at will given its rather simplistic design, and doing the rudimentary algebra needed to get the right values was more math than I've done since high school.

Jiujin's legs were, considering the rest of the body, a pleasure to draw. His use of color for his initial sketch brought the character as a whole to life and added some much-needed depth to the sketch. I again set the legs relative to a single value to allow for the sketch to be as modular as possible, giving full reign to anyone to best discombobulate the character as they see fit. In keeping with my initial impression of Joan's character, I created a simple animated background as a reference to the wonderfully psychedelic battle scenes in Earthbound. The new background story of the character reflects this: as a small, wandering robot fresh out of the factory, lilBot is only interested in making new friends and finding a fresh set of arms.