Making a Data-Driven, Mezen Style Family Tree
The process of creating data art based on Northern ethnic folk paintings
The theme of this data art is my small family tree. Patterns and symbols were taken from the Russian Northern folk painting — Mezen. This style includes black and red drawings of animals and nature motifs. Each element in this work represents one of the closest family members, while the color and embellishments show some additional details about these persons.
For more information about the decryption and description of the work, read the article below!
Process of creation
I have always been interested in the topic of data art, and am inspired by the beautiful works by Shirley Wu, Federica Fragapane, Giorgia Lupi, and Nadieh Bremer.
I have completed some modest data artworks that are done traditionally, but this time I wanted to try something a little more complex and digital. «Family tree» is my first digital data artwork.
When I worked on the traditional data art «Friends» (photo below), I made some mistakes and was really worried about them! Completing the family tree piece digitally gave me the option to change my work many times during the process of creation. But working with markers and liners on paper is fun, too; I recommend it to everyone. The downside is that if you make a mistake you need to redo everything (a white marker could help, though).
The idea of taking motifs and patterns from the Russian Northern paintings has long appealed to me, so I collected the most interesting of the Northern paintings and eventually decided to work with my favorite — the Mezen folk painting, a style with black and red thin-legged horses.
In my childhood in art school, I was drawing some styles of Russian Northern folk paintings with my friends and teacher. I think the examples of these paintings are wonderful, especially the Mezen with their thin lines and modest color choices. I just liked so much the horses with their disproportionately thin but still elegant legs. Also, I like very much the Severodvinsk painting with its complicated red leaves and Gzhel for clear blue color.
The Northern paintings already contain some symbolism and interpretation of images, so it was particularly interesting to encrypt data there.
The following sites have become a great source of information for me:
1. Perunica, author svasti asta
2. Culture.ru
3. Knittochka
Thanks to the unknown art creators for their excellent work and to the authors of articles for an extensive collection and detailed interpretation of symbols of the Mezen painting!
Individual symbols in the Mezen painting already contain data, although without a legend they cannot be deciphered. Who knows, maybe this is one of the examples of ancient data-art, that no one except scientists tries to decipher!
The motifs are simple: fire, water, sun, moon, natural phenomena, flowers, fields, protective symbols.
I have also been interested in the topic of family trees for a long time. Previously, I tried to create an interactive family tree on JSD3 and collected some data on relatives unknown to me, but I did not manage to finish this project technically.
This time I decided to take a smaller amount of data and not immediately dive into the code, but instead pay attention to the data-art component since manual processing is best for small amounts of data.
After putting together a table of data about close relatives and selecting a few features that I’d like to display, I began to draw the main elements.
The biggest challenge for me was to link all the data into a single system so that it didn’t fall apart; so that the elements logically connected to one another. I changed the basic principles several times, including the value of elements and their type and the encoding methods for additional data.
I hope I chose the best way.
I worked with Figma — a great tool for vector graphics! After finding some interesting symbols from different sources, I assigned the appropriate level of kinship to each. Some of the smaller symbols were used for special designations, such as how frequently I communicated with a family member.
The one symbol called “criulka” is my favorite! I don’t know the meaning of this word, maybe just some “curve” thing, but the symbol looks almost like a plant stem. (OK, and the word just sounds cute.)
The wooden surface of household items is often used as the canvas for Russian Northern folk painting, as is seen in the examples above. But for this work, I chose a simple round form. I added beautiful symbols for the frame, then I combined all data-elements inside it in order of connection between persons in my family.
Because this work included many steps, sometimes it was hard for me to continue to work on it. But I decided to take one small step at a time: To find a new example of painting. To create an excel file. To draw some new, simple symbol. Step by step I finished the work faster than I thought!
It’s just wonderful to see the product of your hands and imagination finished before you. Now I feel that in the future it will be easier for me to do my own projects. I hope to do more interesting data-art works!
As the next step, I am thinking about the automatization of creating such a piece of data-art. I think it will be wonderful, but not sure yet in my skills. Maybe sometime in the future.
That’s it!
I hope you like it!
I am Natalia Kiseleva (eolay)
I like data visualization, data-art, and to make funny and educational comics about it. If you like my work, check my comics-projects:
- Diagram-comics: there are a lot of charts used in Data Visualisation. They all have their characteristics, history, habits.
- Dataviz-comics: comic strips are dedicated to data visualization rules. Shining examples and funny characters explain common mistakes in data visualization.
- Dataviz-tools: characters based on popular data visualization tools. Here you can meet the charming Tableau, Power BI, Excel, D3, and other characters!
- Analyst’s comics: Comics and jokes about Analytics and analysts, about the difficulties in their harsh way of fighting with data!
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