For this exercise I chose Miles Davis as the artist whose music I would listen to whilst I drew. I chose the song ‘So What’ – I didn’t listen to it before I started the exercise as I didn’t want to be anticipating certain parts and/or think about how I would represent the sounds through mark making – I wanted the illustration to be as spontaneous as possible. I’m glad that I did this because the song itself felt spontaneous and experimental.

So What – Miles Davis – Youtube

I gathered multiple materials before I began, using inks, crayons and pens. I also used water to smudge the pens and blend all the materials together.

I worked on A4 watercolour paper. I do think this exercise would have been particularly effective working on a larger scale and allowing the body to move more with the music but due to the circumstances right now I am just trying to work with what I already have. I did still manage to work loosely and freely on a smaller scale. I moved with the music and changed materials when it felt right in the song. I followed the sounds moving up and down for the higher and lower notes and worked with ink and water, splashing and smudging on the paper in the smoother parts of the song. Above is the scan of the finished piece – I do think it is interesting how a lot of it looks almost like sound waves, it was not intentional and even though it is a very abstract image it does manage to illustrate the song in a way.

After scanning in the drawing I moved it into procreate where I played with the crop tool to frame different sections of the drawing to see what I felt worked best for a cover for the song. I decided on this crop because I think that it captures a little bit of all the elements of the piece – the different textures of the crayon, pen and inks.

After deciding on which area of the drawing I was going to use I did play around a little and experiment with the hue/saturation tool. I wanted to play with the colours and see if anything fit the song better than the original colours I selected. I did like these blue/green ones but they definitely felt much calmer than the actual song did. The pinks/reds I used in the original illustration were much more true to the song in that they held the same intensity as the music. There was definitely something going on with this in my subconscious whilst I worked as when I was working I was just grabbing whatever ‘felt right’, but when I think about colour theory and the emotions that colour can represent there is a definite connection. Red represents intense emotions/energy and pink is a shade of red – I don’t want to put too much on this as it is just speculation but I did think it was interesting. I have never worked like this before and I certainly enjoyed the freedom!

Next I moved on to choosing the fonts for the illustration. I always spend far too much time on choosing fonts but i do think it is so important to the overall image, different fonts can give the whole drawing a completely different feeling – and the wrong font can distract from even the best illustrations.
For this I wanted to select a font that was quite clean as I wanted it to contrast with the busy background of the illustration. If I had chosen a font that was just as crazy as the illustration I think it would have been lost in the background.
To create the correct contrast whilst still having the text ‘fit in’ with the background for the name of the song I decided to have the text just as the outlines, I think this was an effective way of keeping the text bold and readable whilst still incorporating the background into it – even though I wanted the contrast I didn’t want it to feel unrelated. I kept the artists name full block letters so that it would stand out despite being smaller. I placed the text where it is and the size it is so again, it would feel like a part of the image – this is the same reason I kept the text black – there is black in the drawing but not enough to make the text unreadable.

Overall I am happy with the way the illustration turned out however if I were to do it again I would like to work on a much larger scale and allow myself to be even more experimental with materials. It is hard for me to critique the drawing as with it being abstract it doesn’t fit into the usual categories I would be self critical about. I did enjoy the exercise as it did feel a little bit like letting loose and allowing myself freedom.