Access Art Developing Sketchbooks 2

The second part of developing sketchbook skills and approaches is about visual association. They give lots of guidance in this and suggest a list of words. I chose headache and this image is a mixture of how that feels and representations of the visual characteristics of the migraine with aura I experience.

I experience a lot of these headaches and didn't realize how angry I was about them. It felt really good to get this out and onto paper.

I looked at other peoples work and they had used much larger images, I was really drawn to small sections of texture and color. 

Not being a very wordy person I started this activity by instead not using a word, but a piece of music. I did several pages on Bach, Air on a G string

This was a much more familiar starting point for me. The first collage had two distinct parts, the melody floating in blues and greens at the top and the harmony and bass driving forward in yellows and oranges from below:

I developed this further by focusing on the basso continuo. I am a bass player and I love the direction of Bach's functional bass and the energy it gives

I explored shapes and colors to represent musical features such as chromaticism, tension and release.

The second half of the piece has some different qualities; the melody rises in a more active sequence than the gliding first melody. The bass continues its driving forward motion but this becomes more energetic connecting with the melody in dissonance:

I explored some different shapes and textures to show these features.

Last of all I repeated all of this with lines, the lines were much freer, the blues and greens are the melody, the yellows are the countermelody, the orange and red is the basso continuo:

I really enjoyed this activity and wanted to develop it further so chose a contrasting piece.

Mingus IIBS is one of my favorite jazz works, again due to the dynamic driving bass. In this representation I started with the opening bass solo:

The steps represent the building excitement. I chose woody earthy colors to represent the timbre.

In the main section of the piece there are many instruments each with quite distinctive lines and shapes, I tried to show these with torn shapes. Unfortunately some color has bled through from the following page.

I repeated again with lines:

This was more successful as there is so much going on in this piece I needed the freedom of the markers to express it quickly, I'd like to try and show all these different lines in collage but I think it would need a bit more planning as it is a very lively piece.

I found the visual association to music much more stimulating than to words. These two short pieces of music had so many layers to them. I want to develop this further but have no idea how this might apply to printmaking. The next assignment is collagraph and a representational theme. At the moment these ideas are extremely abstract so I will need to research this further.