Project #1 Lost and Found

Members

Ina Kang, Partner: Jinyun Li

Description

It’s a cubic box. I put some postcards and letters into it. Its color was most red and with a little yellow. It used to be a mooncake box. There were some Chinese traditional flower patterns on the box.

Reflection

When I first received the description from my partner, I could instantly imagine the shape but the difficult part was how to color it. "most red and with a little yellow" sounds pretty straight forward but when it comes to drawing, there are tons of variations and combinations. Literally, it could be anything. So I searched for "Chinese traditional flower pattern" that my partner mentioned and get the hint of where should I put yellow on this figure. It was not so hard to sketch the image I thought to begin with.

I drew a cubic figure and colored it red. Then I added some contrast on the cubic and a flower pattern on the top of the lid. However, coding the image was really different from what I've usually done to interpret a certain figure. I had to set the exact location for each point of shapes and the RGB color code instead of just saying "red". Also, instead of focusing on the overall figure, I have to break it down into specific 2D shapes so that I could use functions to draw them. It was similar to creating sculpture since I had to add elements into a big chunk and play with them to make it looks better. 

I feel like the clarity of the image gets better as I go through each stage. The verbal explanation is very subjective and has multiple ways to interpret. The drawing stage is visual depiction so it's better to understand what it is but if someone has to replicate the drawing, there would be no way to draw exactly the same image. However, coding enables that. Since the information of every specific, such as location, color, shape, and size, is provided in an objective(numeric) way.