Exquisite Corpse

Background

My partners were Ardak Mukanova and Iz Nettere. The corpse you see above consists of a head from me, an upper body from Ardak, and a lower body from Iz. Check out the images below for the original sketches:

The sketch of the first woman was drawn with stylistic techniques from the Mughal era, and is wearing a traditional South Asian sari. A lot of Mughal art depicts people with really fair skin, since that was equated with beauty at the time. I included a darker skin tone to show that fair =/= lovely. Ardak's sketch, the second one, is an abstraction inspired by alien crop circles. Iz's sketch consists of a nude dancer practing ballet.

Design Process

The vast differences between our three sketches proved to be a challenge. In order to have some cohesion between the three sections, I imported each sketch to ProCreate and create a singular outline that combines all three. I used this sketch as a template for the drawing. I took some liberties with the alien mid-section to combine it to the upper and lower, more anthropomorphized parts, and interpreted the circles in Ardak's drawing as bubbles to surround the figure.

The user-defined functions were setGradient for the background, drawWater for the ripples, drawBubbles, and drawBody to color the figure. The new backstory for this exquisite corpse is an alien humanoid dancer. They communicate and express themselves through dance and bubble-making, mainly discussing how Eurocentric beauty standards plague Earth.

Reflection

I enjoyed employing different softwares to create this sketch. Combining different initial sketches definitely flexed my creative muscle, and it was interesting to understand the different perspectives my partner's and I had in the interpretation of this open-ended assignment. Each of our corpses are definitely exquisite! If I had more time, I would love to actually create the outline I made in ProCreate on p5 using the bezier, curve, and vertex functions.