Visualization Exercise

Over the past few weeks, I have noticed that the way that I perceive the world and concepts is slightly different than other peoples. I was discussing with some of my friends on how to convert feelings and emotions into abstract artworks for our final project in school and I mentioned how you just have to pick a color that ties into the feeling and flatten the sequence. Apparently, that made no sense to other people, which is valid. So here is a really short blog on how I visualize concepts. 

First off, I would just like to say, I tend to associate things with colors and scenes so if thats not how your brain works then it is fine but this is just me talking about my own experiences. So for some of the art I create, I have a set idea on how I want it to look, whether it be clothing or poses, I always have an idea of what I want to do. Sometimes however, for things like abstract painting, it becomes more of a challenge as it is not literal and I cannot just go on Pinterest and pull up some random assortment of reference photos. To remedy this problem, I try to figure out how I feel about certain things and how it looks in my head. 

One of my favorite exercises for this is to actually just listen to some music and try to figure out what is going on. It can be music with or without lyrics and with whatever type of style you may prefer. For example, Hanako by sad boy with a laptop, is a very pink and yellow type of song to me. When I listen to it, it reminds me of a coffeeshop and daydreaming and I try to put those images in my mind into drawings. This project ended up being questionably animated so doesn’t quite work for abstracts but basically I try to keep all the elements of the song that I think of in my head and put it on paper. 

Another song is Paper Crown by Alec Benjamin. I was actually listening to this song on the school bus when I thought of a concept based of the lyrics. Basically I thought that the main parts which I had to include into the drawing is a “kingdom thats far away” that is burning, a queen and a paper crown. I think the idea of this drawing came much easier to me since I was just casually listening to it and I was also able to come up with a composition much easier. I then put it into Microsoft Paint (the ultimate drawing app if I do say so myself) to create a thumbnail or basic sketch.

After that I thought of the colors of the song and unsurprisingly it was blue and orange. So i just quickly overlaid those colors and attempted to clean up the image. 

I think that when creating abstract pieces, it makes more sense to just think based off the general feeling of the song and all the smaller more subtle details can also be music smaller in the actual piece. For example, if a song has a generally red type of feeling but they had really calm soothing blue like sounds in the background, I would probably create some smooth blue lines somewhere in the composition. I find this exercise quite easy since I believe most people listen to music at least some of the time and by focusing your brain to think of what these things mean to you, it helps you come up with more ideas and also allows you to figure out how you think.

Try it out! Maybe you’ll like it.