Project #1 Lost and found
Description
It’s a toy from the 90s; An upside down pear-shaped spinning toy with a pointy point at the bottom; It will spin if you use lash to whip it.
Design Process
As soon as I got these three lines of descriptions, I immediately knew that it is a “Tuoluo”, which is the name of pegtop in Chinese. It is a traditional Chinese toy we used to play when we were young. Tuoluo, is not only her cherished memories of happiness and childhood, but also is bringing back my memories too. I started to sketch it out in the paper and drew it based on the descriptions she gave me along with my memories as well. Here is the sketch I have downb elow. Then, when I got a basic shape on, the paper, I broke it down into ellipses, rectangle, arc and triangle so that it could be drawn and then connected using codes in p5js. After that, I started to play with all the colors, modes and all the different elements in p5js.
Moving on to the colors, the original Tuoluo is made in wood, so I used the color in yellowish tone to fill in the shapes I made. I had a lot of options when it came to background, but I chose the grayish blue as the main tone to match with the first part of the title, “lost”. The blue I felt, was expressed in the color blue with a tint of grey, meaning the lost had happened a while ago, which was where the idea of aparting the titles in half and explaining it word by word came from.
Reflection
I moved Tuoluo slightly off the center to go with the second part of my design, the notion of movement. Tuoluo spins if you hit it with lash, that is what I want to show. Now, you are looking down at Tuoluo and as it spins, you can drag the mouse to move it all over the canvas just to see the how amazing and interesting the pattern and the path that Tuoluo creates until you cover all the grayish blue in the background. We then can call it a “found”. I hope this design can bring back some of the good memories when Erin sees this, along with the people who have played this before while giving them a chance to play it again digitally. For those of you who have not, you will still have the chance to get a taste of it. Here is just a screenshot of me ramdomly trying out the pattern and having fun.
