Audio Montage Narrative

We were assigned to pick a favorite song or story and create a Photoshop collage using imagery inspired by the song. The imagery had to include analog drawings of a hand in watercolor, an object relating to the song/story in colored pencil, and photos to collage with digitally.

INSPIRATION

I used the song “3min” by Tokyo Incidents.

東京事変ー能動的三分間 from Quan Nguyen on Vimeo.

Here is a link to a translation of the lyrics, as the translator does not allow reposts:

[ringo] 能動的三分間 Noudouteki Sanpunkan

The song is about someone moving on from past events and developing a more positive mindset fitting for enjoying life.

ANALOG

There is a lot of interesting imagery and metaphors in it, so I picked photos that corresponded with those lyrics. Additionally, the band emphasizes the song’s three-minute aspect both lyrically and in live performances, so I chose to draw a timer.

I do not enjoy using pencil. They are such hard, rigid instruments that have little to no bend. Not malleable at all. I feel like they do not allow the freedom that paint or markers do. It was good to try them, though. I never used just primary colors to do something, although the resulting look makes sense. I wondered before why some color palettes had that weird rainbow-but-not-really-rainbow look. Now I know.

I wanted to fit the timer in my hand, which I started drawing before we learned that it was supposed to be done in watercolor. I was able to fit the two drawings together in Photoshop. This is my second attempt at the hand. I do not find skin tones interesting, so I used the three primary colors to create a rainbow hand. I always end up making skin rainbow.

Using watercolor was really weird. I did a 16″x20″ watercolor piece a couple years ago with warm colors and blue, and that was fine, so I don’t understand why I was so uncomfortable with it this time. Maybe it was the small scale, or that I’m rusty and haven’t painted in a while, or I was having a bad week. Either way, I couldn’t make my usual flat brush or angle brush work and the wateriness did not make me feel nice. Very strange experience.

DIGITAL

Honestly, whenever I think of that song I always visualize Tokyo Incidents’ performance of it which made creating a single frame visual image very difficult, especially considering that I do not understand the language. Eventually I went with a calm, blue vibe with high skies to go along with the last verse, and some objects to represent individual lyrics, like a happy skeleton and turntable (“Raise the dead on your turntable”), a hot-air balloon (“Up, up and away!”) the sky (“Come back to life and be high”), the sexual equality symbol (“it’s the hour of equality among the sexes”), and the timer (“If I turn off the timer, don’t listen”). I referred to the translation all the time. God bless translators, they do such an important service for free. . .

I found some photos of the band, ocean waves, and equalizers at first, but they were too hard to select with the quick select tool and the magnetic lasso tool, and they did not fit in the composition, so I left them out in the end piece.

I had a very difficult time using Photoshop. This was my first time doing a collage in that program. I used Illustrator a bunch before, and I used Photoshop one time to make a gif, but the whole program was so foreign to me. I was very uncomfortable. I spent the whole first two classes struggling to use quick select.

After I sort of figured out how to use quick select and magnetic lasso to crop with layer masks, I was ready to put stuff on the background texture, which I recolored to make the red spot yellow. I put a black gradient on the middle of the upper right, pointing downwards to the right edge.

I was still just plopping things down in random spaces without any idea for a composition until I found the distort tool and used that on the Japanese wave pattern, which made the composition bloom outwards from the hand holding the timer on the lower left corner. This distortion was also able to completely obscure my horrible selecting job on the sky’s clouds on the bottom of the piece. I was pretty happy about that.

I did two copies of the distorted Japanese wave pattern. I believe the top one was changed with hard light and the bottom one with luminosity. After that, I also had the two drawings, a turntable, and the sky. The piece felt lifeless and boring.

But then I asked for feedback! and was suggested to play with repetition, scale, movement, and finding other photos, so I did those things! Different sized and colored timers were thrown everywhere, different opacities and colors options were used on everything (mostly hard light, I think), and I found other pictures in accordance with the lyrics which I cropped with quick select and layer masks and cleaned up with the brush tool.

Here is a link to the finished piece (not sure why it will not appear as an image. . .)

Finished audible montage narrative

Overall, I learned a lot, and I feel a little more confident in my digital art skills. It was also interesting to use a song as inspiration, although I do not think a viewer would understand the meaning of the piece without the lyrics next to it, but lots of pieces are like that. It is okay.