Lost and Found _ Jasmin Liang

Yiwen's Lost object

    "This is an object that I lost several years ago. Actually, I would rather call it a creature instead of an object. It was a gift from one of my friends when we graduated from elementary school, as a witness of our friendship. I had kept it safe and sound for a couple years, but the accident still happened. I let it out on a sunny afternoon as usual. I did so because I believe it needs some exercise and exploring the world outside of its cage. So I sat in the yard with my little boy. My mind drifted for seconds from the warm sunshine, and within that moment, my boy disappeared. He ran into a sparse bush and never came back. He was my first pet, so I was very attached to him. I felt so sorry when I was not able to find him, but it was gone forever.
    Here is a description of how it looks. It’s like a tiny fluff ball that can be held in one palm. It has gray fur on its back and white fur covering the belly. Its two tiny round black eyes are just like obsidian - so shiny and brimming with vigour under the sunshine. It’s ears are as tiny as its short tail, and it’s toes are as pink as its nose. It's chubby with four short legs but it still moves swiftly. It has a soft body, and it’s so flexible that it can easily squeeze into a tight space. It always stores food in its cheeks, such as seeds, dry worms, some grain and fruit. With strong front teeth, it likes to bite things, otherwise the front teeth would just keep growing and become too long and inconvenient. It likes to climb and hang itself in the cage when it wants some fun - it’s not a bat so it doesn’t hang itself upside down."

Reflection

    Using code to depict this image definitely poses some technical limitation in what I can render, especially when it comes to a living creature. But I think that this assignment is not about building the most realistic portrait of a hamster, but more so one’s memory of a beloved pet. It is interesting that we are asked to use code here because I think one of the main functions of coding is to boil ideas down to their essence or barebone structure. With this thought in mind, I decide to use a rather minimal design to convey the form of a hamster, while also highlighting the emotional undertone of her description.

    Since Yiwen’s hamster is strongly associated with her childhood, I use a relatively saturated color palette and a more cartoon-like style. I chose the color blue and this mellow yellow as the backdrop, because her description conveys a mix of nostalgia, the happiness of childhood and a sense of loss. The circles in the background are meant to represent bubbles and also highlight the roundness of the hamster, which she emphasized in our conversation. I also tried to translate every single detail she mentioned in her description: the obsidian eyes, the seed, the pink nose and toes etc. For me what is crucial here is the translation process – how one translates language into image, image into code, and code back into shapes. In each of those processes, I have to learn to see from a perspective that I am not inherently familiar with. For example, I have to train myself to see shape through code, that is, not simply as the formation of space through lines but rather as sets of coordinates in a function.

    Overall, this has been an interesting learning experience for me. To create the more organic shapes in animal, I have to use custom shape functions like beginShape(), endShape() and figure out what methods are applicable under this function. I also played around with beizer curves and bezier vertex and did some research on those methods. It was a bit of a challenge in the beginning but I definitely enjoyed experimenting and testing out different solutions in the process.