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Description
Insipred entirely by this song: www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjPnFc…

I don't do music-inspired art, but this song is an exception. In the beginning, it feels like sleeping, but it flares out to this radiant, infinite ending. Doing illustrations based on concrete symbols and characters in action is one thing, but the abstract, dreamlike music needed something based purely on association. Hence, this relatively simple idea took a long time to develop. Nothing is stable in this image. Spacial relationships dissolve. Though I also wanted dragons in it, so there's dragons in it too.

The pattern is another thing that I managed to trace quite some time ago. I knew I wanted to use the Bishop's Eye, an innovative rose window constructed around 1320 for the south transept of Lincoln Cathedral. The Eye's pattern resembles two leaves constructed symmetrically inside the circle, making it the only medieval rose window that doesn't grow out from the centre (for all I know). Instead, the two halves coexist equally, growing upward, using s-lines harmoniously together with the straight "stems" and great half-circles. This provides a perfect balance between the network-like aesthetic of reticulated tracery (a sub-category of tracery in which a simple shape is repeated inside the window without any hierarchy) and the subdivisions of more conventional styles. All the while, the window even manages to artfully stylize nature, much like the famous west window at York Minster of 1335, where "boughs" form a heart from which the leaves grow upward. The design at York is often compared to the Bishop's eye.
Lincoln: goo.gl/My2wWe
York: goo.gl/gSQNmH

Actually, the similarity to reticulated tracery caught my eye the most, because I wanted to use the Bishop's eye to fill out the area of the painting whilst maintaining a certain dynamic - I didn't just want one little simple shape over and over, but I didn't want to copy-paste a normal window either. The Bishop's Eye was perfect, also because it reflected the radiance and meditation of the song. However, it's still a circle. So I actually had to fill in a few diamond-shaped empty spaces with a design of my own.

The process itself was kinda stupid. I had one layer for the "stone" of the tracery, and one for the daggers (the modified quatrefoil shapes that would normally be glass.) Both of these needed separate masks and clipping layers to adjust opacity and contrast and create a dynamic interplay between positive and negative shapes. For added confusion, the layer below everything had a lighting and texture of its own that both of these layers needed to respond to.

I didn't think I'd learn much from doing abstract art, but it's still subject to the same basic aesthetic principles that regular art uses. Balance is really important, not even Pollock is random. So I may have developed a better hand for this flow and composition.

Description
Insipred entirely by this song: www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjPnFc…

I don't do music-inspired art, but this song is an exception. In the beginning, it feels like sleeping, but it flares out to this radiant, infinite ending. Doing illustrations based on concrete symbols and characters in action is one thing, but the abstract, dreamlike music needed something based purely on association. Hence, this relatively simple idea took a long time to develop. Nothing is stable in this image. Spacial relationships dissolve. Though I also wanted dragons in it, so there's dragons in it too.

The pattern is another thing that I managed to trace quite some time ago. I knew I wanted to use the Bishop's Eye, an innovative rose window constructed around 1320 for the south transept of Lincoln Cathedral. The Eye's pattern resembles two leaves constructed symmetrically inside the circle, making it the only medieval rose window that doesn't grow out from the centre (for all I know). Instead, the two halves coexist equally, growing upward, using s-lines harmoniously together with the straight "stems" and great half-circles. This provides a perfect balance between the network-like aesthetic of reticulated tracery (a sub-category of tracery in which a simple shape is repeated inside the window without any hierarchy) and the subdivisions of more conventional styles. All the while, the window even manages to artfully stylize nature, much like the famous west window at York Minster of 1335, where "boughs" form a heart from which the leaves grow upward. The design at York is often compared to the Bishop's eye.
Lincoln: goo.gl/My2wWe
York: goo.gl/gSQNmH

Actually, the similarity to reticulated tracery caught my eye the most, because I wanted to use the Bishop's eye to fill out the area of the painting whilst maintaining a certain dynamic - I didn't just want one little simple shape over and over, but I didn't want to copy-paste a normal window either. The Bishop's Eye was perfect, also because it reflected the radiance and meditation of the song. However, it's still a circle. So I actually had to fill in a few diamond-shaped empty spaces with a design of my own.

The process itself was kinda stupid. I had one layer for the "stone" of the tracery, and one for the daggers (the modified quatrefoil shapes that would normally be glass.) Both of these needed separate masks and clipping layers to adjust opacity and contrast and create a dynamic interplay between positive and negative shapes. For added confusion, the layer below everything had a lighting and texture of its own that both of these layers needed to respond to.

I didn't think I'd learn much from doing abstract art, but it's still subject to the same basic aesthetic principles that regular art uses. Balance is really important, not even Pollock is random. So I may have developed a better hand for this flow and composition.