A project on a person who has sat beside me for my entire module. Sounds like a great way to get to know a friend. I have known about my partner, Diviya, for 2 years, and actually know her for about a year and a half. It would seem like I have a upper-hand in this project, but the truth was completely opposite. I know so many attributes of her that I would love to portray and it was hard trying to choose what I wanted to do. So after some research, I realised that I had to do something out of the box if I really wanted to portray her in the way I see her, creative and innovative, but at the same time a minimalist to boot.
Then I just happened to stumble upon some optical illusions that I have always wanted to do, but did not really have the confidence to attempt on my own. But there was one thing I have learnt from Diviya, You will never know unless you try. I have seen her from time to time attempting things that she just found online for her own satisfaction. So taking a leaf from her book, I decided to give this a go.
As for why I chose a tiger to represent Diviya, I know she loves to take photographs of the nature and she has a fascination with wild animals. The tiger, essentially a a large cat, had similar characteristics to Diviya, such as playful, fun, enjoyable, and at the same time strong, independent, tenacious and confident.
It was a tedious job, going through every single dot at least 3 times to make sure the size and adjustments were all accurate. But the biggest issue was that, each dot had to have its own layer so as to allow easier editing. Having so many layers cause the file size to be extremely large and my laptop started crashing after some time. So to curb that i had to work on the piece portion by portion and merge the layers after each portion was completed.
After a certain point, I could not actually see what I was doing as i was looking at the dots too closely for too long. But it was all part and parcel of the project and the end product was really worth all the time effort and headaches. All in all, it was a very fulfilling experience.