So after a week of painting I have finished my final piece for the paint a song project. I decided to do the painting like a time line of different layers. In the song there is four different sections of music that changes a lot from section to section. The beginning is slow and a little sad so I painted the top corner a mix of blue, green and purple. This part of the song, which is the first two minutes has a few patterns of music that the different instruments play over each other. To show this I painted two different lines of patterns that were connected to a black line. The white dash which goes through all three represents a single crash of a drum which always stuck out to me in this part of the song. When the song transitions to the next section it starts with the string section playing a sinister sounding few notes which I represented with the red area. The red then bursts into the next energetic area. For this part of the song it is very happy, bright and fast. So for my base I started with yellow and worked my way to red. To show the energy of this area I did a lot of different colored paint spatters, which was very fun. I also have the red exploding back toward the the yellow and orange. Even though it is a happy section I kept feeling the color blue so I added a swirling blue shape on the top. I also have different patterns through out like the brown dashes, blue half circles, and green dashes. Each of these shows a different musical area in this section of the song. I wanted this area to be just as high energy as the song was. Then starting around the 5 minute mark the song changes again, becoming slower and more like the colors blue, green and purple like the beginning of the song. But it is still happy so I added yellow arrows and a yellow and orange section to the bottom. Even though this area is slower it still has energy so I continued with the paint splatters. During this area one part repeats, it is the horns who seven loud notes repeatedly with pauses after each time, to show this I have seven orange lines progressing down the area. The last section consists of happy piccolo strings for the last 30 seconds or so I painted a variety of dots and dashes. At first it was on a white background that called for too much attention so I added a layer of very watered down blue to add to the calming feeling that this part of the song represents.
I decided to paint the song "Run Free" by Hans Zimmer. I chose this song because it has no lyrics and it has so many layers which change as the song progresses. So I did a few watercolor paintings of the song, all in different styles. The first one I did a time line where I listened to each minute over and over as I added all of the layers before I listened to the next minute. In my second one I put water on the whole page before spilling colors that fit the song. These were both good bases but in my final I will need to add even more layers and details. I am currently working on another watercolor that has more layers than the first. These paintings are so much easier than the first time I tried painting a song because I don't have a limited amount of time to paint.
So to get a feeling for this project we had to paint a bunch of different songs. This was really hard because we only had the length of the song to paint and most of them I have never heard of before. My first few paintings had a lot of white space, and we are supposed to cover the whole page unless the white space is artistic and intentional. After a few songs it got much easier to fill the page and try to convey a song. I was so glad when I song I knew came on because I knew how the song progressed making it easier to plan out my painting. The second day of the paintings we got to listen to the song once before we got to paint. This was so much easier because when you know how a song changes as it progresses to plan what you are going to put on paper.
Our final project is to paint a song. But it has to be non-representative. Which means if it was a song that was about the woods, you couldn't paint trees and if it made you think of birds you couldn't paint that either. Instead we have to paint the mood and feelings that the music and lyrics (if it has lyrics) gives off. This project seemed kinda easy at first, but when I thought about it I realized that this is going to be a difficult project. And it is going to be hard to find a song that is paint-able and isn't my favorite song, because I will be listening to it over and over and over and over and over and over again, which tends to ruin a song...
I finally finished my final prints. It turns out that we aren't binding them in class, but I might stay after to bind them. When I was carving my block I messed up at the very beginning. So I wanted the grass to be solid green and the collar to be solid red, but when i was carving out the white areas I carved out the inside of the grass and collar. So instead of being solid, they are outlines, which actually works with this style. So it wasn't that bad of a mistake! It was strange to see the prints at first because they looked backwards to me. And I relived why I am not a huge fan of printing, trying to get the second layer perfectly on top of the first is nearly impossible! I was originally only going to have three colors: black, red and green. But I decided that more colors would be more fun so each rabbit is a different color. All together I am pretty happy with the outcome of this piece.
