LOST & FOUND
Description
I’m not sure where I lost it, but it was my favorite sweater for a while. It was a white cotton sweater, oversized, with a colored mickey mouse in the center-front of the sweater. The Mickey mouse was standing, facing front and smiling, with his head slightly turned to the left, his arms were slightly open but still down, his hands were big and palms open. He was wearing his red shorts with two yellow, round buttons on the top front of his shorts. The sweater had a round neck with a white canaled band around, long sleeves with canaled white cuffs.
Design Process
I started my process by coding out a series of guidelines as a grid. The yellow lines are at intervals of 100. The red lines could be moved around as needed while I was figuring things out.
I added a large rectangle in the center and two quads on either side for the sleeves.Then, I got to work on Mickey. I created a bounding box of space I wanted him to take up. This gave me a range for coordinates and generally helped me to keep my sanity.
It was also at this point where I started using math for my coordinates of my guides. I define two variable as intergets 400 and 200, ie. a = 400, b = 200, so I could navigate points from the halfway line or nearest edge. In hingsight, I should have dused the translate function for this instead. Basically, a lot of my initial coordinates could be written b+20, 130 rather than 220,130. Navigating this way helped me a lot because I could plot things out and move them around more quickly. In the final stage I added color and used a blend mode for the bottons. I commented out the guides. I spent a lot of time trying to use curves but ultimately that failed. I used push and pop to navigate back and forth between styles making the mouse. I went back and used translate and rotate to make the sleeves instead of making them using quads and charting out each coordinate, I just made them using rectangles and rotated accordingly.
Reflection
My partner was able to describe the image well and thankfully this object relies on a well-known character: Mickey Mouse. I really enjoyed her description of it and being assigned to depict something that was joyful. However I really struggled coding this character as I was trying to make them recognizable without going overboard. It was really difficult for me to accept the limitations of the medium as I worked. I tried my best to focus on the larger shapes and symbols.