Unconstrained Creation 101

Unconstrained Creation 101 is a web-based, interactive, and communicative project that cherishes and supports children’s artistic creations and provides an opportunity to showcase children’s artwork.

Children’s drawings have many characteristics. Although juvenile, they are meaningful and have their own styles. The children’s art is a conscious or unconscious expression of the young artist, in other words, their art creation can reflect themselves and their feelings.

However, not all kids get opportunities to share and not all works get the appreciation they deserve. Instead of not paying attention or judging from an adult perspective, people should learn and understand children’s art with an attitude of appreciation. I hope all of us adore, appreciate, and support children’s art.

The children’s drawing portrait generator, a part of the project, is a collaboration with the children from Aimei’s Time Art Studio. They are Zihan Fei, Qing Ge, Lixuan Lu, Puhan Sun, Jiayi Wan, Yuanqi Wang, and Wanying Zhao. Wenjiu Sun and Meng Yang are teachers and facilitators who helped me contact and arrange meetings. Doudou Ma, Dodo Ma and, Qianxi Zhang are also involved in the generator project.

Aimei’s Time Art Studio is primarily designed to teach children how to draw and paint. However, it is not just an art studio, it is a community that gathers hundreds of people. There are people from different generations growing together, appreciating and supporting each other. We hope the studio can be like a plant that performs photosynthesis, has a direction and has possibilities. Right, in time, to the sun.

Through facial recognition, the generator will randomly generate a unique and colorful portrait for the user. The portrait belongs to the user and the creators. The goal of this portrait generator is to give both kids and adults a playful experience and to bring the creators and the audience closer together.

The facial elements that assembled the portraits are materials adapted from real children’s drawings. During the process, I invited three children Doudou Ma, Duoduo Ma, and Qianxi Zhang with me to make paper prototypes. The making experience was playful and the prototype outcome was fun to look at. Later, I invited the children from Aimei’s Time Art Studio to participate in the portrait generator project, and we communicated and created through Tencent meetings.

Most of the young artists drew their element materials on paper. Then, I organized and converted the submitted materials into digital versions and put them into the children’s drawing portrait generator, which randomizes portraits for the audience.

The portrait generator is written in P5.js sketch and uses clmtrackr which is a javascript library for fitting facial models into faces in videos or images and is distributed under the MIT License. The portrait generator is not only showing online but also will be showing locally through an interactive installation during the thesis show at Parsons School of Design.