Project #1: Lost and Found

Description

When I was about five or six years old, I would use a small pair of nail clippers to trim my nails. On the top side of the clippers - there was an off-white plastic panel showing three balloons floating up - one blue, one red, and one yellow. One day, while clipping my fingernails, I accidentally dropped them into the toilet and they slowly floated down drain. For some unclear reason - the memory of those clippers floating down the toilet was my first genuine impression of loss.

Design Process

For this project, I worked with Nikita Shtarkman, who provided the description above. I created a rough sketch of the project before I started to translate it into p5.js.

When I broke the sketch down to its component parts and started to build it in code, I realised the angles and geometry was a little too complicated to calculate mentally. I ended up using a drafting software to draft out a digital version of the sketch I built and I got precise coordinates from that. It led to a much more accurate and proportionate sketch.

Reflection

I had a lot of fun experimenting with p5.js for the first time. As we were limited to 2D Primitives for this particular project, I felt like it was more of an exercise in geometry.

I was struck by my partner's description of his lost object. I comtemplated whether or not to an image of a toilet bowl in the background, as that was where the object was lost, but eventually I felt that would be too literal of a translation. Instead, I tried to capture the feeling of melancholy in my sketch with the blue background and the position of the nailcutter.