Humiliation through Music: A Junior Conceptual Project by Nolan Rudolph (2015)

In Design, we were asked to create a picture that represented our subject (my subject is listed above) and we were to do this through different fine art and digital mediums. For my subject, I viewed myself in the middle of a concert where all I heard was awful music that took no talent to create, whereas everyone else was in love with the music that was playing. This is what I chose to draw about, and instead of my face I used an ear to represent listening, and I made myself red to show the frustration and humiliation I was facing. The black substance surrounding me is how I feel on a daily basis as an EDM producer, as one that focuses on creating melodies rather than making money, it hurts me to listen to these tracks that take no musical talent whatsoever. The one-hundred dollar bills surrounding me were to represent how some of the DJ’s now a days view the audiences, as they strive for quantity and wealth rather than quality and pride. The rainbows around the one-hundred dollar bills are to represent how they interpret the music.

The mediums I used in this picture varied from the fine arts process to the digital process. I created my fine art picture through sharpies, markers and colored pencils. I like to outline the main subjects in marker, such as the perimeter of the dollar bills, and once finished I color it in with colored pencil. I view it as a nice transition from one to the next as you can tell where each figure is at and how proportionally. I used a black colored pencil to fill in the void around me as I thought that it would represent how the darkness isn’t exactly solid, but rather a inconsistent pasture just as it is in real life; you can always get out of your trapped situations. Once we finished our fine arts picture, we scanned our images and then used either Illustrator or Photoshop to edit our drawings. I chose to use Photoshop as I feel that the campus is more interactive. I also liked the thought that it’s really one big picture and not a bunch of layers to deal with. To create the rainbow background, I removed the original colored in rainbow and replaced it with a gradient that held the same colors in the picture, only these were solid lines. I proceeded by filling in any empty gaps with a solid dark texture to represent how the dollar bills weren’t going anywhere any time soon. I replaced the color of skin and filled it with red to better represent the humiliation process, and I decided to keep the black on the floor for the reasons I described earlier.