Hyacinth's Character: Mr. Leslie
He ate so many mushrooms that his head turned into a mushroom. Because his head is a mushroom, it’s hard to put clothes on, so he goes around naked.
Cocalie
An Exquisite Corpse
Collaboratively assembling an exquisite corpse image with two other partners and drawing it in code.
Partners: Hyacinth, Anna, Isla
→ link to code
→ link to Anna's code
Characters
Anna’s Character: Cicada
Storyteller named the “time traveler”. Every 7 years retells the story via song of what has happened to those that have forgotten
Isla’s Character: actual autopsied corpse
An actual corpse that’s been chopped up.
Divisions
Isla → leslie's head, corpse's toso, cicada's butt
Hyacinth → corpse's head, cicada's toso, leslie's legs
Anna → cicada's head, leslie's torso, corpse's legs
Design Process
We all started with sketches done in class. I thought Leslie might be too complicated so I did a dog as well, but we collectively agreed Leslie was too good to not use.
Me and Anna proceeded to make a digital version of our characters, with specified colors. I modified my design to be more doable/fit the divisions better and listed more detailed instructions on how Leslie should be drawn. Upon inquiry, Isla said we could decide colors for her corpse as we wished.
Drawing the different parts with code required me to do some creative problem solving in terms of what processes I’d be using to create different shapes. In rendering Leslie in Illustrator, I was already thinking about this and how I’d make this easier for everyone(I removed all the unusual curves). I used beginShape/endShape with vertices for the nonstandard shapes like Leslie’s legs, basically all of the corpse head, the cowboy boots, the wings, and the body. I still cut some corners with less important curves though. To actually know what I was drawing, I loaded all three final images onto the canvas and basically just traced over them.
My final character is named Cocalie for co(rpse)+(ci)ca(da)+(les)lie
Cocalie is going to an event, dressed with a cicada-inspired coat and human leg looking pants. People of Cocalie’s kind are like a blank slate, they have no color or shape, so they need to wear clothing mimicking the shape of other forms, their heads are the only clearly visible part of their body, so it sort of appears like it’s floating.
Reflection
It was really interesting to see exactly how the three parts would merge together. I had this image of mine halfway through that was looking really weird but I think it actually came together really well in the end.
