Project #4 Exquisite Corpse

Background Story and Design Process

The figure I drew is called Anubis. Anubis is a jackal head god in Egyptian mythology who is related to mummy making and life after death. The unique black color of Anubis is not the color of ordinary jackals, but the color of carrion and the black soil of the Nile Valley, symbolizing rebirth. The heart weighing ritual is an important factor in Egyptian mythology. In this ritual, Anubis will weigh the heart, treating it as lighter or heavier than the ostrich feather that symbolizes Mayat (real). If the heart is heavier than feathers, the heart will be swallowed by the monster “Amit.” The first step of my design process is to draw out all the basic shapes in p5js, then I add functions into the sketch for interactive purpose. I converted all the drawings I received into AI files, so that I can quickly find out the coordinate for each shape and create exact shape that my partner drew. My experimental clock is a timer that is in the form of a Starbucks coffee cup, the time that takes for the coffee to drain is three minutes. I rarely consider how fast can I finish a cup of coffee in real life, I just remember most of them gone too fast. Usually, when I'm working, I forget about time, I think this coffee timer can alter the way I check on time, which is looking at my watch at a random time.

Partner's name:

Ziyan Cai, Yao Xiao, Scarlett Chen, Kyle Xiao

New background Story

Our drawings have different styles, so when I was creating this new figure, I try to kept their styles unified. The figure I created has a three heads, a jackal head and two goat heads, their eyes follow the track of cursor, it is like they are watching the intruder. The new figure has two pumping hearts and a mouth that is at the bottom of its body. I feel the end result gives me a strong feeling of living totem, it watches you and tells the story.

Reflection

One of the most important skills I learned through this assignment is how to make functions. In the previous assignments, when adding special effects to the drawing, I always pasted the written code repeatedly, and then changed the value based on the needs. But after using the function, when I need to use the same special effect, I only need to call the function. In my constant debugging, I found that by converting more values of the function into parameter and argument, this function has stronger applicability.