— What Is Emoji?

“Emoji” are usually a way of using pictures to express emotions.
Emoticons are a kind of popular culture formed after the popularity of social software. They are popular on the Internet, and almost everyone will post memes.

In the era of mobile Internet, people take popular stars, quotations, cartoons and screenshots of movies and TV shows as materials, and add a series of matching words to express specific emotions.

— Artist Research

One app that’s been particularly popular on iOS recently is Moji Maker. The app extracts most of the elements from the original emoji icons to form a package of 16 types of emoji elements, including facial features, gestures, accessories and masks, which can be combined by users themselves to create new emoji ICONS.
The group of emojis I investigated this time actually have nothing to do with this app.

The emojis were created by Sam Cantor, an Art director and designer who runs the Los Angeles-based gallery Cantor Fine Art with his father Larry. Once Larry asked his followers on social media, “Which artist or work would you most like to see appear in an emoji? Do you suggest, we make…” It quickly became a hot event.

What’s interesting about this collection of icons is that they are all based on famous artists or works of art, such as Dali with a goatee, Van Gogh with his ears missing, Mona Lisa, the lovely Vitruvian Man, etc… Even though they look nothing like themselves, if you know these artists and their paintings, you will recognize them at once because they have strong symbolic feature.

— Draw My Own Emoji

According to the requirements, we need to find nine words that sum up this period of time according to the aspects of study, life, body and mind, from the beginning of school to the present. And then we draw them into emojis using our own imagination and the form we want to express.

• The Nine Words

I chose LCC, airplane, virus, ear, computer, camera, two human expressions and pen and paper. Obviously, I have taken up the majority of the vocabulary in study, and of course I have picked some in life as well.

The LCC represents my arrival at this school, the plane is my route between the UK and China, and the virus represents the dangerous situation in the world at present. These three symbols represent the emojis before I go to school and get to work.

The computer has clearly shown that because of the epidemic, we’ve changed the format of our classes to online classes. The camera represents my chosen professional category. These are the ones that I represent in the class.

There are two facial expressions of characters, one is confused, the other is the appearance of a new idea, which represents the appearance of me when I usually conceive homework (I habitually wear glasses when I edit homework).

The last two are the emojis about my life. In the bleeding ears, it means that I have to have another operation due to my ear problems on my way to study. And paper and pen represent my biggest hobby in my spare time, that is, writing stories.

• The Final Emojis

Because in the beginning I just imagined things that happened in school and put them into words. My group members told me that my thinking should be expanded to cover my entire time, not just study. So I took their advice and reimagined it, and after finalizing the final draft, I drew it on the computer.