Saturday, November 20, 2010

Capturing Sirius

Well, from now on, I'm going to use this blog to post about all of my artistic ventures. Not just illustrations, but my music, my paintings, video projects and everything I do. So to start things off, I decided to do a new project every weekend. Last week I did a video called "I, Want, More, You". So this week, I decided to finish a music project that I had started back in August this year, but never found the time to record. Here's the final piece.

The first thing I wrote for this track was the chorus. The melody just came to me one day while I was riding the bus back home. As soon as I got back I figured out how to play it and recorded it on Guitar Rig. The piano melody came a few days later, while I was trying out a new synth instrument I was building in Garageband. Then I put it together to create the intro. The song stagnated here for a few weeks.

Later on I was just browsing through all of my previous experiments of this year and I hit up on a recording that had the 7+8 (15) time signature of the verse. I quickly figured a way to transpose it to the right scale and plugged it into the song.

After that I just played along with the track all through the weekend just going with gut feeling to figure out solo sections here and there. I wanted to create slow and absorbing solos, not really technical, but with a strong space-travel feel in them.

The arrangement of the song tells a story. The intro is more like a preparation for launch into space. The first chorus is the actual launch into space. Then the first rhythm and solo section is more like a unification of spaceships in space to create a giant spaceship. Then we venture out to find Sirius. The lyrics come in as a god like voice that gives each spaceship the instruction as to how to capture the star. Then comes another solo, which is more like getting prepared to start the capturing process. The second chorus is initiating the capture and the final solo describes the capture of Sirius and destruction of the matter within.

The lyrics is basically a play on capturing the heavens from the perspective of a spaceship. Sirius, being the brightest star in the night sky has a lot of historic and mythological significance, so the lyrics vaguely suggest that.

The song has a very spacey feel, so each time I listened to it, it felt like I was on a giant spaceship as big as the star itself. And the spaceship would use up the entire star to power itself.

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Lotus Guitar (Work in Progress)

This one came to me in one of my dreams a year back I had logged it in my journal and completely forgotten about it. However, I'm doing a music video next semester, and I decided to go through my dream journal and this image struck me. I decided to make a painting of it so I sketched it out on paper first.
In my dream I had seen him as a white, ghostly and thin-built. But for this painting I decided to make him fat and exaggerate his shape. I'm going to make his hands and feet really small. I'm kind of liking the look of these exaggerated features, don't really know why though. So I pulled out a 16x20 canvas and my acrylics and got started with the background layer. I really had fun painting the background because it let me do what I love doing the most -- play with paint!
This actually has a few layers in it already. I started with a bright yellow wash, then dabbed on some dark blue around the edged to create the vignette. Then layered some crimson to create some highlights. Then finally used white to blend in the whole thing. I used my fingers for the whites, and totally felt alive as I painted! Next I used watercolors (orange) to draw out his outline, and then started painting in his body.
Then added the bright red guitar.
Far from complete. Much more to come soon. Sorry for the terribly lo-res pictures. I'll get the lab's T2i sometime and post better pics soon.