1. Project Concept
a) The subject and/or topic:
Create your own flower with different elements, choose the color and background and send it to others.
b) Why important?
We select flower as our main elements because we find many young people nowadays rarely express their love and feelings directly to others. They may be more willing to convey love through small gifts like flowers. For example, as the Mother’s Day is approaching, the users can create and customize their own flower and send it to mothers. The flowers will be based on the real flowers, but it will grow and bloom depending on the choices from the users. They can also send the flower not only to their Mom but also to anyone they care about. We want to make a net art that is more flexible and customized, which can encourage people to express their love and thankfulness to whom we love and those who love us.
2. Inspiration and Sources
The first source we found is a website called wildflower, we were inspired by this because the flower it generates is so vivid and beautiful, it also contains a part to send this flower to someone we love, which is also an idea we want to express. However, many people are not familiar with the flower language and in this project, the flower type is limited and generates randomly without any intentions. Therefore, we want to add more emotions to the unique flower and give it some explanations so that the users can choose what type of flower they want and who would like to send.
The second sources we refer to is mainly related to our technical issue of coloring the flower. This website is mainly a game of filling the blank pictures but we think the single and plain color may be too dull for a flower, so we decide to make our own templates and substitute them based on the color choices.
3. Production
In our project, the user will first choose to add different emotions and elements to the flower, such as love, friendship, tears, grateful, happiness, etc. Then the flower will be generated depending on what the user chose and the meaning of the flower (flower language) will be shown beside the flower. After that, he can choose the color of the flower and we will switch the color template for each color choice. He can also change the background environment of the flower to better fit the meaning of the flower. At last, he can click the share button and send the flower to others.
In the production process, we will first do the researches on what kind of emotions that can be added to the flower and how it related to different types of flower category. Then we decide to draw flower templates using p5 and based on the shape of real flowers. The user may select the elements they want for their flowers and click “grow” to generate the flower and the corresponding flower language. There will also be some sound effects when the flower is created. We will prepare the color templates for petals, pistils or leaves that could better merge with each other.
After the flower has been made, we plan to use the scroll function to let the users change the background environment that best matches the flower language or their feelings. This also requires a lot of research on the flower and their meanings. We also want to play different background music according to the background so that the entire piece will be integrated with each other.
For the last part, after the user selects all the alternatives, they can click the “finish and share” button, the screenshot will automatically be generated and the pop-up window will show the ways they can share, for example, email, facebook or other social media, or save it to the desktop.