216. Music Monday #8

My lovely friend Xin once suggested making music with water glasses as a part of this project. Here's my first try at it:

This is probably the easiest song ever to figure out. To all the German readers: This is NOT about Christmas... ;D

I'd love to try singing glasses at some point but we don't have enough stemware plus they crack so easily. But maybe I'll find a way sometime to try that, too.

154. Music Monday #5

Okay, since this one is definitely too difficult to figure out, I'll just reveal it:

Mike Oldfield - Dark Star

What was really interesting about the process of drawing this was how the star changed from radiating darkness to radiating light and finally to radiating both. I had thought about doing this with watercolours or acrylic paint, but it turned out that charcoal was an excellent choice: There's a lot of power in this music, it's very forceful, and it requires rather a lot of force to apply that much charcoal to a white paper to make it look this dark.

I love listening to a piece of music over and over again, and transforming the sounds into an image. This is a rather unusual one, though, because colours are normally important in that process...

For those who are interested in the music: Here's the version I was listening to.

147. Music Monday #4

Oh dear, it looks like last week's music project was too difficult to figure out after all. Well, maybe I'll just post the solution in a comment... :)

For the one today, I'll give a little hint: It's also (rather strongly) related to a movie...

Just a quick sketch and watercolours. - I had originally thought of something very different for today but that would have required a lot more time and I was at home for about 3 hours total today. Maybe next week.

129. Star Notes

A lot of music-making today, so I've got a musical star:

Ever since I found out about Bach's way of inserting his name into his music (by playing the notes 'b', 'a', 'c' 'h' - which only works with the German names) I was very annoyed by the fact that only two of my name's letters are also notes. That's when I developed my own way to expand the names of notes to include the whole alphabet (which basically ends in most of the notes having two names^^). For the sake of simplicity and structure I used the English name (means: 'b' instead of 'h' for those used to the German ones).

So this is what 'star' might sound like in Music:

126. Music Monday #1

I've long since been planning to insert a little music star project into this project. There are plenty of songs about or at least mentioning 'stars' one way or another - so I'm going to fill Mondays with music related stars now. Here is the first one - and it simply had to be the first because this song was stuck in my head during the first weeks of my Year of Stars: Whenever I thought 'star' this song would start playing in my mind; no way to stop it.

I thought I might make those Music Mondays a little quiz (although the first one is quite obvious - at least for those who know the song^^). So, who can give me artist and title of this song:

Colouring will have to wait. Long day, it's late and I really need to catch up on some quality sleep. (By the time I colour this in I might even have a scanner and thus get a proper picture of it! :D)

27. A Human Supernova

Wow, I'm blown away! Some 60 to 70 people came together and made a star to help me with this challenge! How can this be explained? Well, apparently, it's quite simple: Discworld fans.

You go out there, stand on a bench, call for attention and ask for help in making a star out of people - and they come! They would stand on the marked lines and wait patiently for the City Watch to appear (in a surprisingly well-formed line!) and take formation in the middle. You ask them to wave and they wave. You ask them all to jump and shout 'Supernova!' - and that's what they do! :D

Guys, you are truly amazing! As yet, this is the star I've had the most fun with - and I'm still fascinated by the fact that it actually worked! :)

It's so right to say that there seems to be something special about discworld fans, that they're more like a huge family, really, and help each other out - strange as the request may be. They're the most adorable freaks I've ever met.^^ [Quote: 'You've worked at the check-in, haven't you? Would you happen to know if someone found a finger? About this size, with blood on it…']

Thank you all for such a wonderful weekend and for giving me the biggest star and the most laughter of this project so far!

Lena aka Elfe Lotta

P.S.: There have been made about a ton of other pictures of this, so maybe I'm going to add a few when I get them.

Update 2011-10-11:
I've got some more pictures and spent last night working on a little video putting them together. Here it is!
[Since the quality of this 'Blogger' video is unfortunately quite bad, I also uploaded it on youtube in HD.]

25. Good Morning Starshine

...the earth says 'Hello'!

You twinkle above us,

we twinkle below...

This is a short but another special one:

Just before I'm about to leave for the German Discworld Convention (YES!) I've got a little time for one more little star project. I loaded a song onto my phone and set is as ringtone for my alarm (which I am going to need this weekend). Here's my currently favourite version of the late 60's song from 'Hair': 'Good Morning Starshine'

Note: Once again, I'm probably going to be offline for the weekend (til Monday night). And once again: Stars will be made, only posted later. :)