Portrait

My impression on Marina

Marina is a beautiful girl. Before talking to her, I notice that she always wears very beautiful looking clothes. She is elegant and polite. So before talking to her, I suggest that I would create something beautiful.
After I talked to her, I know about Marina that she is from a very beautiful place in Spain, with very beautiful natural scenery. She is loving to animals and loves nature.

I also had some unexpected discovery of Marina. She is also a girl interested in psychology. She is developing her ideas and concepts very seriously by spirituality, human perception and the visual stimuli in the world. Her style of work is unexpected to me. Through the process of portraiting for her, I am trying to understand how nature, love and psychology can come together in her life.

Challenge

I don’t know about spirituality very well. But I know this must be a very important part for Marina. She is much more than beautiful.
But it would be hard for a person know little about psychology to get into psychology. So I tried to find some pieces of work that has something to do with psychology that I had watched.
This is an anime I have watched. It is called “KAIBA”, which means Hippocampus. This is a plant that can eat people’s memory stored in their Hippocampus. I thought this combination of plant and psychology is interesting. I also know that many Hallucinogenic plants are used as medicine for mental health. So I decided to do a portrait creating some enigmatic virtual plants.

Trials

I try to create some plants with code. I notice that mirror plays an important role in her work as a way of perception. So I studied about how to write a mirror with shader.

However, I feel it is not in the right sense for me.
So I create another plant.

This one looks better for me. So I start to play with it in processing.
I am trying to use plants to create a picture of Marina. It does not create it in a right sense.

So I tried with another pattern and still does not work very well.

This is a 3D space for these enigmatic plants to grow.

These plants are layered in a way that looks like Marina most.

Thoughts

I should ask my partner which background music might be suitable for portraying her. Because sometimes music is a good way and an accessible way to sense somebody. Imagine you are typing code in front of the computer and hearing the music she chose, it can reduce the possibility of you falling into the wrong direction.
Below is the music I listen to when I am doing this assignment. (It is not chosen by Marina. It is just what I like). So the portrait aligns with the music very well.



For me, this assignment is really hard because I would always fall into the wrong direction. I always go into the wrong way that suits my personal interests and preference.


For example, below is a portrait that suits my interests but does not look like Marina from my perspective.


Thanks to Marina being so interesting and different from me. I tried the style that I never expected and that experience of trying to understand her through making a portrait for her is amazing.