In 2022 Dominic Harris visited several schools to engage the students in creating digital butterfly artworks. Following a presentation about his research and design processes with the students, Harris sought the children’s artistic skills in collaborating to create new artworks.
Sharing that he’d made an exciting new discovery - using advanced technology, he could replicate hand-drawn illustrations into a digital medium - Harris tasked the students with creating their own unique butterfly species which would then become part of his new artwork series, Metamorphosis: Unicus.
Creative juices flowed as the children set to work producing an immense variety of designs. The resultant butterfly illustrations clearly reflected the discussions in Art Week about colour, theme and technique, as designs were notably infused with passion and vibrancy.
Harris believes it is important that children be introduced to the concept of merging concepts, art and computer code, and thereby forming a great understanding of the infinite possibilities and routes of creativity that children might take in their futures.
Dominic Harris worked with each year group in an interactive lesson introducing his own art background and process, and then focussing in on the significance of the butterfly studies he undertakes within his own art practice.
Each student was then given their own template on which they were encouraged to use any media they desired to created their own butterfly.
The student then named their butterfly, and the completed artworks were collected and brought back to the Dominic Harris Studio where Harris' team captured the works and used computer vision and AI techniques to translate the butterfly into an animated artwork -- effectively bringing the drawn butterfly to three-dimensional life.
Once each drawing had been classified it was brought into Dominic Harris' artwork code base in order to be brought to life in a manner similar to his Metamorphosis artworks.
