San Jose, CA, is a “minority majority” city in the United States. With large Asain and Hispanic populations, San Jose has many different cultural influences. However, many San Jose residents, including myself before this project, aren’t aware that 5 Chinatowns had existed through the city’s history. Being Chinese American, I felt this a good opportunity to better understand the roots of the cultural intersection between Chinese immigrants and the city of San Jose.
For this project, we used Autodusk Mudbox to digitally create models of cultural artifacts. To choose an artifact to recreate, I looked more into the histories of the 5 San Jose Chinatowns to see what artifacts existed within them. In my research, I found that most of the Chinatowns were not well documented–most of them had been burned down, then later demolished. However, there had been an excavation in the third Chinatown: the second Market Street Chinatown. Here, several artifacts had been discovered an documented on an online exhibit called “There was a Chinatown Here”. Within these artifacts, I selected to model the last one in the exhibit, a “Frozen Charlotte” doll.
Frozen Charlottes were small porcelain dolls that were around the size of a penny. Their name originates from a poem by Seba Smith, with the line: “His Charlotte was a stiffen’d corpse, And word spake never more!”, referencing the stiffness of the porcelain. These dolls were not Chinese made, rather, they were produced by German and English people, demonstrating the cultural intersections within the San Jose Chinatown.
In Mudbox, I started with a default sphere. Based on the reference, I used the sculpting tools to push it into a basic doll position. Afterwards, using a stencil reference, I edited and refined the shape to be more accurate to the actual doll.
From there, I used the Projection Texture tool to paint on the doll’s main features and colors, using the regular paintbrush to fill in any missed spots. I finished the process by chaning the shape’s material preset to porcelain, giving it the same gloss as the actual doll. The center photo below shows the final result, in comparison to the referenced photo on the right:
For a 360 view of the entire doll: