Exquisite Corpse

Description

I get the inspiration from my favorite book, the Little Prince. He is not in that story, and he comes from my imagination. Each person is composed of abstract geometric figures in that space, and each person is an independent and unique individual. They have their planet. Just as each of us is unique in reality, the communication between people is like the exploration between stars. I created this character because I believe that people should respect others' uniqueness while remaining themselves.

Design Process

Nishra, Haoshu, and I were members of the same group, and we exchanged our drafts and distributed parts. Our characters have different backgrounds and stories. I'd like to share first:

Nishra's story:They are everyone! They are you and I at some point in our lives! They are battling for the well being of their mental health. They have anxiety that knots up their mind and ties up their gut; and depression that makes them weak in their knees. They are afraid to face the world that is often too harsh. They are fading from within trying to fit in. They’re Anonymous, because some do not want too recognize them.

Haoshu's story: It’s a monster. It terrifies us. It makes our life aberrant. It could be Thanos with his ambition of eliminating half of the life in the universe. It could be a catastrophe causing millions of tragedies. It could also be the COVID-19 that changes our everyday patterns, hurts people and ruins families.  But it is not a portrait of a fierce evil who plays with human life. It is a monster but it is not inevitable. It scares us at the beginning. But after people’s bounding together with careful researches and works day and night, the monster could just be like what I draw on the canvas—a controlled plush object.

Combined with the other team members' drafts, I unified the style and then made the final drawing. The difficulty is that the three of us have very different styles, so how to extract the material and unify the technique needs to be thought over again. I used the falling text as the background to show the complexity and diversity of the world. The characters in the front are not depicted in more detail because the three of us want to express more spiritual. If there are too many details, people will think that we refer to a particular person or group. The wing part represents respect and freedom.

Reflection

I think I've learned a lot from this project. Technically, I experimented with font drop and wing flapping for the first time. The setup of the project itself was fascinating. Instead of creating our characters, we traded with the team and created new content. It is similar to the concept of respecting others I mentioned because we need to respect and tolerate the style and content of other team members to complete this work.