I had an interesting though the other day about the relationship between different types of music and different types of visual arts…

For music, there are songs that are purely instrumentals and songs that have lyrics in them. The goal for music (not all) is to express an emotion. For instrumentals such as those of classical music, we can look at music from the baroque period, where the instruments were very expressive with each key that was hit. The Instrumental aspect of music, I would say strongly helps with conveying a specific mood. It is used in movies (even though some of us do not concentrate on the music used in cinematography, each strings/instruments correlates with the emotions changing at that specific moment in time). It’s only natural, there are psychological effects that change out mood according to the minor and major scale…

For songs with lyrics, they also convey some sort of emotion. The lyrics and vocalists are the dominant tools for conveying the emotion, rather than the instrumentals. In comparison, graphic design with words accompanied by visually weak graphics are designs that without the text, the composition cannot stand alone or does not make as much sense.

The relationship with art that I came up with is that instrumentals is like visual art. There are no words, yet your single senses can pick up the emotion that it’s trying to move you with. If you look at music with lyrics on them, I see it as some sort of aid to help emphasize that emotion. The lyrics are, obviously or a negative or positive feeling accompanied by it’s complimenting scale (major or minor). What I tried to do was listen to the music with the inustrmentals only (ignoring the vocals), it becomes quite repetitive, your emotions stay quite monotonous, whereas if you listen to very successful symphonies, you can feel a mood change as the keys change - there is more variation. This is much more evident in music found in cinematography.

What’s funny is that the comparison of popular music (with lyrics) and graphic design (with text) could be placed in the same section.. and they’re both more “modern” whereas art and instrumentals (which are more traditional), could also be placed in another section together… and they’re both more traditional. What is this saying ???

This is another project for my first year course @ OCAD. It’s on a pretty large canvas

The narrative is about how the media changes our perception of our body image and gender binaries.

Acrylics (watered-down, medium, thick), tissue paper, drafting tape

Here’s two more portraits that I did for practice. I’m trying to finish 100 of them by the end of first year.. and hopefully improve

Lester B. Pearson & Jean Paul Sartre:

Another anatomically incorrect drawing: I’m going to make a series of them and bind them all together:

Here’s an old anatomy painting of hands that I did a few months ago.. I’m not happy with the composition. But that’s before I learnt about the Golden Mean

Acrylics & ink on Canvas

Here are some portraits for my drawing class. We were only allowed to used lines but had to create contrast without tone:

Here’s a still life study of a polaroid camera:

Ink & Gouache on Cardboard

This is a mix media piece that I did for my Surface Intervention class:

Collage, Vinyl sticker, permanent marker, wires, electrical plugs, cardboard, LED lights on Wood Canvas

I created a hand made an LED circuit board by twisting the + & - wires, LED lights and a cardboard to hold things together.

Statement
The yellow motif represents Media & the red and orange motifs represent people in society.
When people connect (or “plug-in”) to the media, their mind is influenced by the messages that they are being exposed to. In a way, it powers our thoughts.

I finished this portrait of Jimi Hendrix last night :

I’m trying to practice technical stuff (with a series of portraits of my idols) but they always turn out… not so typical…

Stencil style, halftone.

Jean Paul Sartre sketch, pencil and black ink pen.

Just practicing: line & tone work to create contrast.

Proportion needs major work (It doesn’t look like him… :))

black ink pen & pencil

Gouache, pencil, black ink ink