Is This Your Guitar?

Description and reflection

My partner, Prakhar, described to me the guitar that he once lost. It was an acoustic guitar, whith it's body of a very light brown. The guitar was symetrical and had a rounded shape. He described it using simple language and he didn't give me many details, probably due to the fact that most people are familiar with the way that an acoustic guitar looks like, so previouls knowledge was assumed. Based on the idea of lost objects and the way that we remember them in ways that usually are not very accurate, I wanted to create not one guitar, but as many as them as posible, making multiple variations of one design, with the hopes of helping Prakhar, and whoever is currently reading this, to find their own unique guitar.

Design Process

I began using only rectangles to sketch my idea. The goal was simple: make a generic guitar.

But as I made progress and completed my first sketch, I inmediately realized that I really didn't like the way that the guitar would look if I represent it using a rectangle.

For that reason, I decided to challenge myself and use bezier curves to make the body of the guitar look more realistic. These kind of curves (and curves in general in p5.js) are hard to work with, since they are not very intuitive, so this was probably the hardest part of the process. I created a couple of auxiliary functions (buttons for grid and anchor points) that would help me understand the way that these curves worked. A few mistakes while doing these actually ended up looking pretty interesting.

Finally, I coded a guitar editor using sliders to control the different anchor points that gave the guitar's body its shape. All that was left was to randomize the creation of these guitars. Also, at the end, a few lucky errors allowed me to include a couple of fun features.