Assignment 4 - Paint to music

Black and white line and shapes exploration

For the first and second part of this assignment, we are to continue the mark making phase where we experiment with different kinds of tools to use on A5 sheets of paper, but this time, theres a little twist. We are to create marks based on contemporary music and classical music, which I thought would be fun and stress free because I love music so much. The aim for the first part of the assignment is to explore at least 3 pages of black and white lines and shapes where I used the same ink from the last assignment. The second part is pretty much the same thing, but with colour which I was most excited about considering we never added touches of colour throughout our past mark making works. For that, I used a range of different colours of paint. Based on the instructions the second part where we explore using colour does not only require normal white paper. We are assigned to also experiment with texture and by that, we could use any sort of paper that we owned that could either be textured or different coloured.Apart from using a variety of tools as mentioned before such as cotton buds, sponges, tissues, sponge brushes, crafting materials and straws, I added on some additional tools which I could use as I had a feeling it would go well with the music. I added on tools such as cardboard, doilies, string, leaves, stencils and tracing paper which gave me some good outcomes. Throughout the processes of the first and second part, not only it leads us to get an idea of what we wanted our final 2 pieces of art to look like, but I really got to connect with music a lot more by making marks out of it. Because contemporary music has become trendy and has taken over the music industry for the longest time now, I was glad that we were assigned to make marks out of classical music as well. After creating a few masterpieces, it made me appreciate the existence of classical music a lot more. All I did with the marks was just by going with the flow when listening to different kinds of music. Some were loud, some were soft, so i tried my best to incorporate the different moods into the marks that each music gave.

Colour and texture

exploration

Final artwork ( contemporary )

Final artwork ( classical )

After the exploration phase where I listened to many old classical pieces, I decided that I wanted to do something a little bit different. I didn't just want to paint to normal classical music like I did repeatedly throughout the exploration. After some brainstorming, I decided that I wanted to paint to a horror classic because its different to my ears. I ended up choosing a music piece called " The Shadow's Bride " .Listening to the music, I could already tell how horrifying it sounded, but it was exactly what I was going for. I could imagine the music playing in a dark environment when a bride walks down the aisle with lots of dark and dull colours surrounding the entire place . I got ready my dark colours, brushes, mark making tools and my artline pens and started composing my artwork. I tried to avoid any sort of pastel colours just because the music does not go well with it. The colours that overlap the second layer of colour represent the chello at a higher note and the colour at the bottom that is being overlapped represents the chello at a lower note because the music mostly plays a higher note. I used my artline pen to draw on some narrow and thin lines to represent the piano that plays with the chello. In between the lines, I added some yellow instead of black for contrast and so it balances with the touches of yellow in the middle. The marbling plays a part of the piano as well because in the music, it felt like everything was falling so I chose the marbling that best suites the music and made the it look as if it was falling in the artwork. Overall, I was glad that i made the decision to choose horror classic to paint to simply because I think it's nice to be unique when designing a piece of artwork.

Listen to the music here!

Listen to the music here!

I was mostly excited to paint to contemporary music simply because it's the type of music that I normally listen to. I chose this song called "Anchor" by Cailee Rae because she wrote it with pure feelings and emotion and the fact that she's my age, I can pretty much relate to her and all of the teenage issues that we go through. This is a song about someone or something that is holding you back so that is why she creatively incorporated chains which shows that you would have to face yourself , underwater scenes which shows that you are drowning in your own thoughts and colour which shows that you're being covered in your own emotions. Because those scenarios are included in the video, I wanted to symbolize it in my artwork so that's what I did. I once again gathered all of my tools and started to paint the base completely sky blue to represent water and overlapped it with shades of grey, which represents what's bringing me down, purple and pink , which represents hope and dark blue, which represents myself. I drew and painted on grey chains tied around myself, and with hope , I'm working my way past through what's bringing me down. For this artwork, I used a combination of different sized brushes, sponge brushes, stencils and artline pens . I planned for my work to visually tell a story rather than it being an ordinary painting based on music. Despite all the intense brainstorming, I enjoyed painting to this song because it has always been one of my favourites to listen to and that the fact that I could fully relate to it as a teenager.