PARANOIA
Exhibition Text :
My piece "Paranoia" connects to the soul and emotion of that feeling of being so nervous for something that the world starts falling apart around you. Inspired by Kairikibear's song and cover, "BUG", "Paranoia" takes a deep connection with the all in mood and feeling of the music composition and lyrics, and places them into this piece for dramatic effect all around.
Artist Inspiration :
The main inspiration for this piece is the song "BUG" by Kairikibear, a Japanese songwriter that uses Vocaloid's to create and depict a song theme. Though the piece is not inspired by the song alone, the cover art was very nice and fun to look at while comprehending what the song was, and that is what I found so inspiring about it. The color scheme, various details, and the direction of the art was very nice to look at from the different black and white parts through the cover.I also like the excessive neon green which surprisingly fits well along with the differing purple's and pink's throughout the background. I say this because neon colors usually don't fit something that well, but each color basically compliments its own throughout the cover. Another thing is how the song literally matches the fierce cover so well. The instrumental is so powerful and intense that the cover matches that exact feeling you could imagine is happening throughout the song. I wanted to include that exact feeling through my piece, but through my own idea, put it to an extent. |
Something very interesting during my research is that many people do their own cover's of the song, both artistically and as an actually vocal cover. These exact covers not only take the color scheme from the cover art, but change them to fit their own theme of what they portray the song to be. I love that so much about the intentions of music and how people change the way they see the feeling of the song. Though the cover to the right doesn't actually look much to any different from the original cover, it still changes various aspects about the image. This is exactly what I wanted to make my piece about within the inspiration, something that sticks towards the ideas, but also puts its own spin to it. |
To be truthful, my first actual listen to the song was through an official cover by a mobile game that includes a various catalog of songs created by different producers. One of the various groups covered the song and basically its one of the best covers through the game. Changing the topic, the art for the music video is very different considering how the literal song looks from the top two images. This connects to my idea of interpretation of how a song connects to someone. Though also I wanted to take aspects from this music video into my actual piece. Starting of with the glitches, I wanted something of a glitching reality to connect with the story I am trying to illustrate. Another thing seen throughout the song is these black, flowing lines that change their form as the music continues. I wanted to take those and turn those into "excess paranoia" in which basically reflects the amount of it leeching off of the character. Each rendition of the song had an intake on my viewpoint of my piece.
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Planning Phase:
Within having Kairikibear as my artist inspiration, I decided to start off my planning by coming up with my theme which is pretty obvious but, "the deception of paranoia" concerns taking a feeling that is shown through the real world and turning it into reality. This is why I had through the sketch the flying chairs and tables. It also connects with a certain area, a school setting, though it wont look much like one. Throughout the song, extreme and breaking emotions are felt with the instrumental, I wanted to capture that "push" feeling I get from it. On the right of the planning page, I started off what expression I wanted to get through the piece. Had I wanted something like a "happier" expression, or a "surprised" expression, I tested it out before ultimately going along with something closer to the music video. |
The second page is a character concept, which focused on who would be experiencing the sudden rush of paranoia through the piece. Something I wanted to take in from my inspiration was the overall expression the girl made on her face, an almost crazed expression. Except, how does that fit with being paranoid? Truthfully, it doesn't but overall in a school setting you are made to remain in a positive light, so I take two different approaches to the character. One that is fairly simpler, and another that is full on crazy, one showing actual emotion, while the other keeps hold of it in. I would depict her situation as a high school senior that has filled up with so much responsibilities she reaches her break point when a teacher calls on her for no reason. Being so paranoid, the world feels as if it crashes before her. By the way, this piece does not fully illustrate within me so do not worry! |
The last page of my planning is pretty short relating to how much left I really had to cover before actually starting the piece. Nothing really new is here other than more expression tests and things about the surrounding objects that would be around the main character off the piece. I also tried to perhaps copy a style of another adaptation of the cover art, but I figured that would disconnect me from my main inspiration so I had not kept it. In complete reality, the last page of planning was more of finalizing the idea and concept into what I wanted it to become.
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Process:
The first thing I usually do when working digitally is I create a sketch and go over the sketch as my "line-art." I do this specifically because of how I just cannot seem to sketch on the actual program. So after I created my sketch I moved on to working on the specified line-art. The main focus at first was to create the blanker expression than finish off the piece with the crazier smiling one. I wanted to keep a relatively similar floating pose to Kairikibear's cover, I decided to wait on finalizing the things of the background until I focused on finishing the main figure of the piece. The next couple of photos will go into my description of how I took similar colors and ideas from the cover and crafted it into the piece. |
I had the original inspiration of the piece right next to mine not only for referencing but to compare the colors I was gonna use on the figure. The first thing I always do is the skin color, which is a very light purple that goes along with the parts I kept as skin color. Next was working on the base colors, I wanted to start off with how I was going to create the skirt of the outfit, because I knew the hair would be the most tedious part. After completing those I wanted to start off with the similar white-purple color along certain parts of the dress to be similar to my inspiration. Eventually after I was a bit into it, I caved in and started doing other parts of the outfit, this was actually to try to understand the contrasting colors more apparently, as it's something I never really do when shading a piece. |
Working with the sleeves gave me a better idea of what I was trying to accomplish with the skirt. This time I placed the skin color as the base for the sleeves, and went over that with the black in order to shade the outfit correlating to Kairikibear's cover art. I would eventually do something similar but with opposite colors for the skirt and several other places among the skin to shade out the piece. Each different colors would also have an outline of the opposite color to differentiate from the several different parts of the outfit. Except for the bottom of the skirt which keeps its neon colors entirely with no lines to show parts of it. The next part will show more in-depth of the entire outfit and the hair coloring. |
Within doing a similar thing to the shirt and rest of the outfit, I had to work on the hair color next... I wasn't exactly a fan considering I wasn't working with one consecutive color. I took all colors (purple, pink, light-orange, and yellow) and placed them within the duration of the hair. I did a Gaussian blur to combine all color and erased any part that was out of the line art. With that all being done, I also worked on differing aspects like the boots and collar, which aren't really shown off in the cover inspiration. I did a similar affect towards the boots to the other aspects of the outfit, but also used a really dark blue to differ from the black. This also started the line art for the surrounding objects, and after that was completed, all that was left was to color them and do the background. |
Now that the main character was finished, I colored in the chairs and tables using similar colors from the dress and skin just like the inspiration had. Then i pushed out black lines among the background in the shape of a fence and blurred them out to look like a fence, but way less detailed. After that I created another layer into making black lines flow around the character, I would eventually blur out those lines similarly to create a more focused point of view on the character, and to look less messy. I then took some of the purples and pinks from the background and merged them together using a Gaussian blur, in which combined the two colors more clearly like a color-scheme. Each portion was to follow a similar instruction to how the cover of the song looks. |
This is how the finished piece looks, but her expression is way different from the one's in the upper photos. This was showing the second portion of the piece with a more crazed expression. This wasn't fairly hard to do, as all I had to do was overlay the skin color over the last mouth and replace it with another. After this was done, I overlayed a pink base over the original photo and dimmed it and overlayed it over the piece to put a pink-ish color to the entire piece. After that, Procreate has an effect that can glitch out the background, so I did that to make the background have a glitching and crazed effect. This was to connect to the other inspiration of the music video. |
Experimentation:
One form of my experimentation was my facial expression and character building. Within that, I wanted to see which character expression would fit within my image, and overall who I was going to put in place. I wanted to create a sweet and soft looking character and change her in the second form of the photo to look more crazed and insane over the excessive paranoia she has. This is not to put a negative stigma on someone with a lot of paranoia, but more to duel the crazed emotions of the song itself. |
When I first initiated my ideas, this was basically the experimenting first idea of the actual piece. It combined the elements of both inspirations and was technically more in-depth to an initial idea. I didn't use this idea because it took away from the "school-like" connection to the piece, and also it was very complicated towards how simplistic some ideas are on the cover for the song. My idea also changed the forms of the tables and chairs from looking less royal to more school like, and kept the chat bars from the music video. The idea I eventually carried out would've been way too detailed if not for this experimenting of my initial ideas. |
Critique :
Similarities:
- Color : My piece and Kairikibear's cover uses similar colors to the clothing, hair, skin, and all around forms of our pieces, a variety of purples, pinks, and reds are used through the background as well as similar colors to the objects around the character.
- Character : My piece and Kairikibear's piece use a similar female figure with a similar expression to their faces.
- Objects & Effects: Our pieces both use similar objects through our backgrounds such as fences, chairs, and tables. We also both use glitching effects and flying objects around the character to tell mood of the song.
- Position : My piece keeps the character in full body in the middle, while Kairikibear's cover has most, but not all of the full body located through the piece, and their character is closer to the screen.
- "Lines of Paranoia" : This idea is carried through mine form the other inspiration while not actually being shown off through the cover.
- Other Objects : My piece does not include any of the school supplies Kairikibear's character seems to be holding.
Reflection :
This project was extremely fun to work on considering the rush of time I had to do to complete it. Since I really grew to like my inspiration I am really happy I was able to use it to create this piece. Within that, the inspiration looks really close to the original, but it does have it's differences, which I cannot really tell if I do or do not like. A whole point within these renditions of the song is to create a story within your head of the music and I love the idea I was able to carry out. Also, the inspiration really connects with my interests of lately so it perfectly fits well with my personality at this point, though way less dramatic. My idea was carried out to the way I wanted and it followed along within my own instructions while keeping a similar aspect to my inspired artists, and there's nothing much more to say to that. I am really proud of the aspect to work digitally about this as well. Since I was able to work in a program that I am more comfortable with, I was really appreciative of how it turned out in the end. Most of my pieces give me mixed reactions, but I really enjoy how this one was carried out.
Now, to talk about overall improvements I would want to this piece, I really wish the piece was a lot brighter. To be more clear, the piece compared too the inspiration is very dark, and it throws off the clear inspiration. Another thing is space, I wish I put a lot more objects to cover the area because the surrounding looks very empty considering the actual cover looks filled with various things. I also literally forgot to shade in the hair, so that was a mistake. For skill sets, I would really just want to improve my art within procreate a lot more, and I believe with this piece it helped me understand another way of coloring. Doing something similar to Kairikibear's cover really got me clearer info on relating to an inspiration more clearly and building up my skills on the tablet. So overall, I am really happy with how the piece turned out, there are things I would of course change, but those are minimal compared to the assets of the piece, which is very enjoyable. I am excited to continue my skills on digital art within the future.
Now, to talk about overall improvements I would want to this piece, I really wish the piece was a lot brighter. To be more clear, the piece compared too the inspiration is very dark, and it throws off the clear inspiration. Another thing is space, I wish I put a lot more objects to cover the area because the surrounding looks very empty considering the actual cover looks filled with various things. I also literally forgot to shade in the hair, so that was a mistake. For skill sets, I would really just want to improve my art within procreate a lot more, and I believe with this piece it helped me understand another way of coloring. Doing something similar to Kairikibear's cover really got me clearer info on relating to an inspiration more clearly and building up my skills on the tablet. So overall, I am really happy with how the piece turned out, there are things I would of course change, but those are minimal compared to the assets of the piece, which is very enjoyable. I am excited to continue my skills on digital art within the future.
: Connecting to the ACT :
- Clearly explain and describe how you are able to identify the cause-effect relationships between your inspiration and its effect upon your artwork?
Within my first hearing of the song, I already knew I wanted to create something with it, the whole cause of my listening to the song for the first time effected literally my whole idea for the entire project. Since it was basically part of my first introduction to these kind of songs, I basically turned into a full on fan to think about it.
2. What is the overall approach (point of view) the author (from your research) has regarding the topic of your inspiration?
Karikibear created the song literally depicting the feeling of paranoia, and while it doesn't dully connect to what the piece is about, it connects deeply to the imagery that went through the song instrumental and lyrics.
3. What kind of generalizations and conclusions have you discovered about people, ideas, cultures, etc. while you researched your inspiration?
The people among the Vocaloid community work very hard within actually tuning the characters voices to match their direct sound. So much work goes into creating a song and to do all of it is true talent.
4. What was the central idea or theme around your inspirational research?
My central theme revolved around how paranoid people can use that feeling and turn it into a piece of art. While doing my research I based it off of looking at other peoples renditions of "Paranoia," it was very interesting to see all the different ideas.
5. What kind of inferences ( conclusions reached on the basis of evidence and reasoning ) did you make while reading your research?
I found it really nice to learn about how composers use these specific characters while creating their music to craft out an idea they can put out without actually having to have a singing voice. Within all that they can crate lyrics, art, and craft millions of different situations within creating an idea for a song.
Video Inspiration Links...
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(Both videos contributed to my planning and ideas of the piece.) |
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: Citations in MLA Format :
“Kairiki Bear.” Vocaloid Wiki, https://vocaloid.fandom.com/wiki/Kairiki_Bear.
“バグ (Bug).” Vocaloid Lyrics Wiki, https://vocaloidlyrics.fandom.com/wiki/%E3%83%90%E3%82%B0_(Bug).
“バグ (Bug).” Vocaloid Lyrics Wiki, https://vocaloidlyrics.fandom.com/wiki/%E3%83%90%E3%82%B0_(Bug).