Exquisite "MonkeyQuinn"
Description
Based on Joshua and Crystal's drawings of Harleyquinn and a toy Monkey, I created a new character called "Monkey-Quinn". With a monkey face and feet and a harleyquinn body, this quirky, sort of creepy-looking chracter is actually quite likeable.
Reflection
Making a new background story for a created object is hard. I don't know much about either of the history of these characters, nor are they important to me.
This new object was the combined efforts of my partners and I. It contains interests in animals and animated characters. It contains memories of things drawn, given and loved.
This new character looks a bit fierece but approachable.
Design Process
I'm not good at making pictures in design programs such as Illustrator, so I was in awe when I saw the pictures of my colleagues. Moving shapes around on the canvas of these programs is a difficult things for me to do. I don't have much experience at it but I am learning.
Since we had 3 people, I took two parts of the monkey and one part of the harleyquinn character.
Writing the psuedocode for this was reasonably easy, it made sense to separate the parts and make sure they were being drawn in the right order.
Creating a modular set of functions for each of the pieces of the figure makes a lot of sense to me (like little boxes), and also makese it easier to follow where everything is being drawn on the canvas.
Making the ellipses for the monkey face and features is getting easier. I still have issues with rotating and translating, and push and pop. They don't always seems to do what I want them to do. Or expect them to do.
Making the organic shapes of the Harleyquinn chracter was extremely hard, and I made some progress but I odn't love the results. I need a bit more practice with the vertex and and curve shapes to feel like I've mastered that, or at least created something somewhat interesting. The mirroring technique I got from another colleague helped a ton and that made duplicating the image so much easier.
Making the characters fit together was difficult. The legs of the monkey were small and the harlequinn had pants that didn't quite fit into the drawing. So I inprovised. I had to shift the shapes a bit to make them match and connect. Legs couldn't be floating around.
I think I'd like to work on this a bit more. I wanted to add some harleyquinn shaped confetti based on interactions, but I didn't have time to add that. If I get better at making the shapes more quickly, I will add it in the future. I wish I could use more of the skills I have learned, but while working on this, I seem to look for what's easiest to make it work, not how I could do it systematically.