I decided that my final project for the first part of ICM should be based on something personal. As I’m interested in meditation, I incorporated theory of chakras as energetic centres of our body into my work. I chose anahata or heart chakra which controls love energy in the body and influences our emotional and physical states. Its colour is green and it’s usually drawn differently from the way I did it. I found it was hard to draw a lotus in p5 so I went with what I can do.
The sketch represents the 3 states of heart chakra. When there’s not enough energy in it, it is imbalanced, and one may feel distrusting or intolerant. When it is balanced, one is open to other people and compassionate to others. However, when there is too much energy concentrated in the chakra due to heartbreak or other pain, one can become overgiving and codependent. When you click on the screen, more heart chakras appear and with that the word that indicates associated state simultaneously changes. It’s also possible to decrease amount of energy going to the heart chakra by clicking on any of them. I was glad that I had an opportunity to use several arrays, class and return function.
Video showing a working sketch
What I would do differently: Initially, I wanted to create an energy ball full of smaller ellipses that would blink and move around the cursor. But is spent several hours and couldn’t figure out how to do that. Hence, I changed it to the rotating stars. If I had more time, I would figure out how to add it. I’ll work in it more after the project presentation to make it happen!
What was the main problem: One of the big issues for me was that I was confused whether one function can do both make something to appear and disappear. After a day of attempts, I asked for the help of one of the residents Arnab, who helped me to understand how to do that. I’m really grateful for that, as I started to think it would be impossible. We ended up using Daniel Shiffman's video as a guidance.
Summary: I feel like I learned a lot and feel confident in my skills. Even though I felt like a combination of arrays and classes all in one week was a bit too much. I'm still planning on developing this project further!
Screenshots of the code