Exqusite Corpse

Description

Partners: Ishraq Ashtarian, Zhehui Chen. The new sketch came out as a humanoid cat with a creepy grin on its face.

Design Process

My original figure is created based on the image of Cheshire Cat from Alice In Wonderland. I did a group costume design for this character when I was an undergraduate student. I remembered that we were allowed to change the setting and the theme according to our own understanding of the story. My group focused on Alice’s transformation and growth in the wonderland which also represented the complex adult social world. And Cheshire Cat was neither a positive nor a negative character who always led Alice to multiple obstacles and nightmares. She needs to overcome the obstacles to grow up and become stronger.

Figure from Ishraq: Architects use human figures to describe the quality and the quantity of their sketches. This is one of my favorite human figures by Renzo Piano that represent the ideology of his work.

Figure from Zhehui: Kaw's classic image with X-shaped eyes.

I was so impressed by the iconic creepy grin, so I decided to draw a cat with that facial expression as my figure for the assignment. After exchanging figures with my two partners, I put the body parts together and got a humanoid cat which I found perfectly matched the character of the Cheshire Cat. Since the wonderland in my setting was the complex adult world, I think it was reasonable to give the cat a human form in Zhehui’s upper body of Kaws. Also, the lower body of the figure from Ishraq gave me a feeling of instability which reminded me of the gradual disappearance of the Cheshire Cat in the story.

Reflection

The User-defined Functions provides a great way to make the code neat and well-organized. Applying user-defined functions to my sketch makes me avoid the endless repeated sentences. And what I struggled with were the different coordinates of the points on the shapes and how they transformed to another coordinates since I’m not a person who is sensitive to numbers and math.

It was great to work with my parteners to see how different parts of the figures reassembled as a brand new creation, and to get inspired by their works and thoughts.