Exercise: Abstract Illustration

Exercise: Abstract Illustration

This exercise did excite me, It had me create abstract marks whilst listening to classical music. The exercise wanted me to convey my interpretation of the essence of the piece. The track I chose to listen to was "Lullaby for String Quartet" by George Gershwin. This track started out quite slow, it had a gentle flow unlike some more intense classical pieces. It felt like it was the calm sea air drifting through a town. I began just inside my sketchbook with a pencil. I created basic pencil lines just freely and random as I listened, I had no pre empted thoughts or ideas of what I would draw, I just drew. 

From listening to this track for the 1st time I felt like there was a small sense of mystery with the track, there was never any danger. The song didn't want to create suspense but rather adventure. I love how the song felt like it was climbing to something which plays into the adventure theme. I think it is fitting given the title of the song. Usually lullaby's and bedtime stories are adventures you tell children before they sleep. As I said before this song felt like it had so much flow hence my free flowing lines that bounce around the page. 

In my mind I imagined one fluent strand of colour, it is graceful and weaves its way along a path. This path is surrounded by darker colours, its as if it is escaping something, this represents the villain of the adventure. However overall I still didn't want to convey too much danger that's why the 'darkness' had to still be colourful. The song reminded me of a Disney movie where they want to include suspense but a child friendly suspense. 

I stood back from my original sketches and loved the dancing colour. I also included black lines gradually climbing up to represent the climbing notes of the song and the change in pitch. 

This painting was created on my Ipad using pro create and my apple pencil, this allowed me to be very experimental with colours and brushes, overall I loved the process to much and It delivered such a traditional and authentic look as if it was painted on canvas. 

I then took another step back and tried to square off part of the painting and isolate it. I chose this square below, I feel it represents the core of the message that I am trying to portray, it features my yellow lines more predominately will moving away from the large amount of red, there is still enough to deliver the message. The yellow was my colour of choice for the marks because as a colour it is bright and positive with lots of energy, I chose to compliment the yellow with blue dashes of colour, these have so much energy and movement within them. There is also waving lines of blue that dart off course from the yellow path.

Here is my reworked piece, it is slightly different to the square image from the original piece, I didn't want to just copy the painting but enhance it and change add elements that I think add to the artwork. One thing I did was make the core strand of yellow more definded, I think this gives more of a focus to the painting. I feel this gives it a sense of character and almost animates it,  as if it is a snake. I then added a deeper blue to the background just to lift the yellow off the background and provide contrast. I then used that deeper blue throughout the piece to improve the flow.

I then took the square image and create an album cover out of it. I often feel like serif fonts are reserved for classical music just because both the font and music have heritage and class. However I wanted to use a bolder sans serif font just to add contrast and bring the music into the modern world. However I did use a serif font for the song title, because I feel it fits and looks gentle like the 'lullaby' in the song. I then used a mockup I found online to mock up the cover into a record.

Overall I thought my response to this exercise was good, I was nervous about creating abstract art because I attempted to create some art for a previous exercise and It did not end up successful. In my mind i thought that it would be a case of creating random bits of paint around a page but it was not that simple, you had to have an idea of what you were doing and really but thought into every drop of paint or in my case every stroke on my Ipad. I thought listening to the classical music really helped me as it gave me a basis to build my work on.