Abstract illustration

Rhapsody in Blue – George Gershwin

I chose this piece as I am  quite familiar with it and already have a copy. Having stated that; the copy I have is on CD and having a copy on a mobile device would seem more practical for the purposes of this exercise.  When investigating what was available, I learnt that Gershwin originally wrote the piece as more of a jazz orientated number, contrary to the most common later interpretations. I found a recording played by Gershwin himself with the Paul Whiteman orchestra.

On listening to an extract decided that I would purchase the download of the track and use it as the basis of the exercise.

With pencil and sketch pad at the ready  I played the track and freely sketched, literally anything that came to mind or was stimulated by the sounds. Hoping that for a) inspiration and b) some theme or image that might be worth developing.

Observation; there are a lot of horn fanfares, this put me in mind of triumphal Roman legionnaires parading through colonnades. However with the additional tempo changes this image stalled.

Adopting a more considered approach, I initially visualised columns of trumpet bell shapes and wide stairs  representing the scales. I toyed with the idea of dancing gloved hands maybe on a keyboard.

columns of fingers in a trumpet bell

Thinking about the meandering scales led me to the idea of the game of snakes and ladders perhaps the upward scale can be represented by ladders and the snakes to indicate the downward.

I thought of snakes in terms of brass instruments with the bell as an open snakes mouth. But then the other way round the snake bodied instrument. I created an image from a photo of a snake with the head changed to a trumpet bell from a photo of a trumpet. It didn’t work for me but I was still keen on the general idea.



So I formulated an idea with brass instruments with bodies that have snake characteristics. Piano keyboards for the ladders, bit of a cliché, .

I played around with some other imagery snake entwining and coiling around things each other this was to get a better sense of the natural look of the reptile in different positions.
I made a draft of a potential final piece.

 To follow through with the loose snakes and ladders idea I decided on at least an impression of the squares of the board game, a background of squares blocked in with various hues of blue.
These, kind of, make sense of the travelling of the ladders  making interconnections of the phases of the music; alluding to the differing textures and moods within the piece.
Here is the finished piece;

The Image development exercise

Mushing

I made the mistake of selecting images that were aesthetically pleasing rather than for diversity of content. That's not to say that either image is totally out of the question...

The shaggy donkeys - St Martin de Re

 This can make it quite difficult to crop in to enough views; as required in the exercise. I did just that with the donkeys image and have ten pleasing views  in various formats. But was at a loss as to finding single words to describe each picture. But I realise this is not the whole point of the exercise.

I went through some recent holiday photographs. Then came across this one of a band playing.

They turned up one evening  in a convoy of cars, did a few numbers got back in their cars and disappeared again. For the purpose of this exercise it appears to have enough going on in it to fit the bill.

First part of the exercise to create cropped versions of the image, varying the format...and name them.

WAITING

CAPTURE

FASCINATION

UNACCOMPANIED

CANOPY

ANTICIPATE

GENERATIONS

HIDDEN

ONLOOKER

PERCUSSIVE

My short list for the next part of the exercise is Fascination and Unaccompanied.. I put both words into the Visual Theasaurus app. something that I find very useful from time to time. You can find it here http://www.visualthesaurus.com/ . When a word is key to an excise I like to check my understanding of  that word. Plus it might open other avenues for exploration.

Struggling to make any headway with Fascination.

Fascination?

I turned to Unaccompanied and courtesy of VT I have settled on ' A cappella' as the caption to use in the Poster Illustration of my 'Unaccompanied' image.
On further reflection I conceded  that to use the term 'a cappella', which is for an unaccompanied vocal style rather than for solo instrument is stretching the point. So I have decided  to use SOLOIST.
Initial thoughts on the poster design are; The boy with the trumpet is central maybe with a very feint repeated crowd background.
.

I plan to use a treble clef as the initial letter of the word soloist.

 A couple of years ago I did an OU course on the technology of music and focused on the trumpet. The course included spectrum analysis of the sound of the trumpet and I am thinking of using the graphical interpretation of this incorporated in my design.

Jazz font

Now we come to the font for the text. There are plenty of web sites where you can view, try out and download fonts for free. Entering the term 'jazz font' in a browser is a useful starting point. Also try clef in google images.

Lets get going..

The treble clef as an S idea. I found lots of examples and having found the one that seemed the most usable traced it on to semi transparent layout paper.

At the same time I had found a font called Jazz. It was not free but you could view your phrase, at any point size, to screen so. Having done that and cut and pasted the result into MS word. At this stage all I needed  was a print so that I could play around with the clef idea., I felt that it didn't really work as an S but having traced it on to this type of paper meant that I could flip it over to see what it looked like reversed.
This way round worked well, yes it looked like a slightly ornate S rather than a clef but that's OK.

Here is a redrawn  clef/S together with the Jazz font.

I now focused on the boy with the trumpet. I sketched a copy from the original image on the screen.

My proposed design idea was to use only the silhouette of the boy; so I traced my sketch and blocked it in with a PITT artist pen.

The next item on the agenda is the spectrogram of the trumpet note or a wave image based on this. I do have my own from the work previously mentioned, but that work has been 'archived'. I expect that there are plenty of examples on the internet.
Ideally I would like to find one of the full colour type showing all the harmonics.

Whilst searching I consider some of the other type of images that I come across. Here are some examples; all based on a single trumpet note.

They are not quite what I had in mind being too open and lacking impact, but worth considering all the same. Then I find what I am looking for.

Now I can put together a rough draft of the ideas and see how they look and here are the elements loosely combined.  As a work in progress I am pleased with the overall balance and composition.

A question that occurs to me is regarding the background. There is a lot of white area and although I am basically happy with the balance of empty space the stark white doesn't quite gel.
I investigate poster designs on the internet looking through colour supplements and magazines and I quickly come to the conclusion that  poster and full page advert designers appear to have a tendency to avoid using plain white areas in the design.
One design that I came across used a white silhouette on a black background. I think that could work for me.

I set about putting the design together but with a white silhouette of trumpet boy white text and black background. and the easiest way for me to achieve this is to use Photoshop.



Whilst trying to reverse the text image file and clean it up, I change my mind about the font. Now operating in Photoshop it would be much easier to find a font that I can download  and add the text in any colour size or style over the other components.
Thanks to Font Squirrel; I first try Deftone Stylus which has the look of brass instruments about it, I also change the text colour to a brass / gold colour. But I don't think it suits what I am trying to convey. One of my initial thoughts on font was to resist a script style, so I search a bit more and come across Seaside Resort font.
The large Os appear to emphasise the solo aspect and kind of mimic the end of the trumpet. I decide to go with this and drop the clef idea altogether, well it is a bit of a cliché.
Having now got all the layers in place at this stage the silhouette is still white but since changing the text colour my feeling is that I am not sure about it now. I create a finished B4 size PDF of it then I change the colour of the silhouette to match the text as below and save a PDF of this.

I am not sure which I prefer the gold silhouette just edges it I think. 

Here is the final poster www.chezsud.co.uk/OCADOC/imgdev_ex_final.pdf