Designing Emotion

 When trying to decide what song I wanted to go for, I immediately went for something in the genre of country music, as many of the songs are very strong in emotion and often have a story telling aspect behind the lyrics. In 2019 the album "Pony" was released by Orville Peck, and is now the series of songs that rose him to fame, as they took on a very retro vibe to traditional country that carries strong emotion and feeling to the listener. One of my own personal favorites on Pony is "Dead of Night" a song about reminiscing over a persons absence- its very lonesome and aims to hit in the feelings.

While this assignment aims to avoid referencing the song directly, I still wanted to incorporate some of that night time feel, this song gives the impression that there is a feeling of regret lingering while the "story teller" recalls good times and the lack there of.

Starting on my canvas, 16x20 in, I tested out a few colors to push the emotion of loneliness and desperation, eventually I landed on a darker blue, falling closer to purple, afterwards I added a "grunge texture" effect on top and selected multiply to create a grainy background, the color I went with made it hard to see the texture so I reset the texture to overlay, and lightened up the background color (#7474a2), moving on, I looked up some free to use images of the night sky and quickly found a handful that I cycled in and out of the canvas, finally landing on a starry sky- I set this as an add layer and changed the opacity to 40% which gave me the exact effect I was looking for, at this point I was brainstorming as I went but when I set in this starry background it had an empty block in the center which immediately gave me the idea I wanted to use. For my idea, I wanted to add a sinking ship and blend it into the sky so it appeared as if the boat was sinking into the vast depths of space, so I went and found another free to use image and took the background out and used a low opacity airbrush eraser to help me blend and use an additional add layer. My main message now for this piece was; When caught up with the intensity of emotion, you can let yourself sink. I wanted the space to represent the emotion, as in the song the singer is feeling very alone, and space is quite empty. Moving on I added in a lighthouse to give a slight spotlight to the text I wanted to add into this piece "Just don't sink" to represent "coming to your senses". For the spot light I used the lasso tool to select my areas both on the "water" and slightly on the boat, here I cycled through a handful of layer options, but soft light suited it best with a 54% opacity.

The last things I added to this piece was the text, using a font I downloaded online called "Theboldfont-bold" added in the tagline and used a clipping layer on top to add more of the starry effect so the text was just hardly visible (sometimes the voice of reason can be hard to listen to) and then I went and added some black and white images of rodeo clipart to add into the background (set to multiply).

My biggest challenge in this was trying to convey the emotion in the song without directly referencing the lyrics or story- it was a bit difficult for me to get abstract with this, but it helped me learn a new style and how to achieve a less illicit meaning. Additionally I struggled at first finding images to tie into this, but quickly there was a few reddit forums that pointed me in the right direction.