Creative Endeavors: Creepy Cute Challenge

Inspired by a lesson from Olivia Gude's Spiral Workshop , My students investigated the Creepy/Cute Aesthetic. I showed them a Blendspace collection of images and videos I found online that explored the psychology of what makes something creepy and what makes something cute. Click here for the link to everything I showed my students.

Essentially, it comes down to this:

You can make anything cute by "babyfying it". Make it soft and give it rounded edges, smaller than normal and, if it has facial features, it should have big smiling eyes.

You can make anything more creepy by bringing it close to the edge of really human like, but obviously not really behaving like a human should. ie. clowns, porcelain dolls, mannequins,etc. The more human like it is, but it's just a little "off" in the way it behaves, it gives you the creeps. Not grossed out, just makes you uncomfortable.

There is actually a psychological definition for this uncomfortable mental space. It's called the "Uncanny Valley". V Sauce (One of my favorite You Tube characters), makes a great video about it here.

One of the fun parts about being an artist and teaching kids how to make art, is to give them the tools to make the viewer feel and respond a certain way. The challenge for this creative problem was to encourage the viewer to either respond with "Awwww, it's soooo cute!" or "Ewww, that gives me the creeps!"

Ummm, ok, yuck.

Here are some of my students responses to this creative challenge. Many of them altered their own photographs digitally using free photo editing apps. Some made their dog cuter by enlarging his eyes or themselves or a baby sibling creepier by making it just a little "off" and then worked from there to create drawings. At the end of the challenge, they lined their work up and made a scale ranging from the creepiest to the cutest. It was a fun conversation. I bet they won't forget this project for a long time!