I was nervous about doing this exercise. I was immediately overthinking everything, and invariably going to end up not following the brief as intended. I stopped everything, put on a track by The Gipsy Kings, and started drawing.
I drew several pages of stuff before looking at anything else. Some stuff is more pictorially representative, and some stuff is more abstract.
I chose the Gipsy Kings because by coincidence I had been listening to a lot of flamenco and spanish guitar stuff recently. Paco de Lucia and Rodrigo y Gabriela. I’m not overly impressed with my results. I guess in the past I would have said things like “abstract art isn’t really my thing”, but recently I’ve been appreciating a lot of early modern art and I see it as less of a realism-abstract dichotomy and more of a broad spectrum. I certainly enjoy using certain shapes in my own work, and I like incorporating different geometric structures as background elements. I was panicking about doing this exercise the right way, see my notes here:
The red text that just says “overthinking it?” sums it up. I just listened to the music and tried to let my mind wander and doodle whatever I felt like doodling.
In choosing the segment to develop into a more finished work, I struggled a bit but settled on this part:
Throughout all my pages I repeated this kind of swirly thing, trying to settle on a form that I thought best represented the music. I was imagining a kind of spinning flamenco dancer.
For my square format artwork I decided to use gouache. I’ve worked a lot with watercolour but I’ve never used gouache, so I recently bought a small student set and I think this is the perfect exercise to experiment with it, given that the intention isn’t necessarily to make anything pictorially representative. Just seeing how the paint works for the first time might create something expressive and interesting. I know it’s also a good paint for use in illustration due to its opacity.
I cut some watercolour paper to a square and tried painting something, again playing some music by the Gipsy Kings.
Here’s what I came up with.
I mean, I don’t hate it. I think it’s better than what I expected. There’s definitely a lot of superfluous elements. I could have been more thoughtful with stray elements. I decided to do some photo correction. I liked the idea of black background rather than the white one, so I tried to play with some inversion, but it didn’t work out that great.
In the end I settled on a minor crop and cutting a few errant lines. Here’s the final piece.
I think yeah, this could work as a CD cover. It definitely has a sort of flamenco, Spanish vibe. It’s high energy and I think it fits with the Gipsy Kings. Overall it’s lacking some polish. But for an exercise that was causing me a lot of stress I think it turned out quite well.
Just out of interest sake I googled The Gipsy Kings albums and I was really surprised to see a lot of similarities to what I came up with, which was kind of reassuring! Especially these two:
Josh Robbins OCA Learning Log 