APD week 8 - Play and Body theme

Context

In the notion of the new trendy application that I found many people enjoy playing with: Reface application.

https://futureisnow.net/reface/

This is not an out breaking new development in the world of applications (face swapping filter on Snapchat is already published), but the idea of having our face in the game and turn to a famous character in a classic scene is exciting. I think as the term “idolise” is acknowledged since movies and celebrity had their place in the industry, this concept can satisfy the “guilty pleasure” of many users , but in a different approach as role-playing character games has been doing.

Inspired by that, I came up with the idea of making character designs by simply combine the face of human and the body of an animal randomly.

Method

Drawing an animal body in Procreate and randomly replace the head.

Response

I just quickly got the references from Internet source to draw the animals. After that, I draw some random human faces with different expressions on a blank canvas. Together, I connected them all with just few simple lines.

Unlike what I always did when it comes to character designs: thinking and considering carefully about how each element work in the whole piece of work, this time, I just spontaneously gave it a random go.

The result turned out was ugly and some point unbearable, but the way of playing with placing random human face on animal body was fun to do.

Reflection

The results turned out to be as bad as I expected, but surprisingly I received good response when I showed them to some people for feedbacks. Most of the people laughed at the funny illustration while others admitted they never think of such a weird combination for any sort of creature.

As I think about the term of “Play” , I usually thinking of different, interesting  ways to solve a problem, simply as I believe the work can be done easier when more excitement and interaction are built up. I felt like the theme “Body” is potential to do something involving with interactivity. Even though through this week’s response, I still stay with my practice based in animation, the idea of having an approach the problem in a spontaneous way is something to trigger creativity.