Tangerine Development

Mouse-over or touch/drag to interact with The Repast of the Lion. Or, view fullscreen.

About the Art

Henri Rousseau is an artist that I've loved since I was a little girl. His jungle landscapes are dreamlike, colorful, and beautiful. During much of his life he was panned by critics, but then later achieved fame and respect. Always the way, isn't it... I've done renditions of his work two other times in my life - a 6ftx4ft painting with tissue paper of one of his paintings when I was ten, and a Rousseau mural on the wall of our first apartment in college. I'm a fan, I guess. I chose this particular artwork of his from the Met's Open Access art collection.

About the Programming

This interactive used the same technique I used when I created Literary Trees adapted from this example, but with more trees and branches and much less randomness. It uses PixiJS for all of the sprite rendering and such. I wanted to recreate the locations and components of the trees as much as possible from the original painting. Each tree and flower is described in JSON format with its size and branches/leaves/etc. I also incorporated a bit of a parallax effect to make it feel even more like a diorama.

The most difficult part of this work was Photoshopping the painting into so many pieces. It was tricky to cut all of the leaves and trees out while leaving the background somewhat intact. I mostly used the clone stamp/healing brush tool to fill in the background of what I cut out, and then I also used some dodge and burn to make the hills look good behind the trees.