For the second design analysis project, Professor Carson wanted us to pick any song of any kind of style and take a set of lyrics or notes from the song and turn it into a design based on those lyrics or notes. We were able to chose between a few options to create our design. It could be a 2-d drawing to even a short video or performance to convey our design from our songs. Now we couldn't just take some lyrics and literally interpret them word by word, we had to create something that hasn't been done before, something unique that portrays ourselves and our ideas.
I didn't exactly choose a song that had lyrics, I went a more classical route. The song I chose was Canon in D by Johann Pachelbel. It is a song originally done on the piano, but since then has been done on various instruments, especially for orchestra instruments such as violins and cellos. I chose this song in particular because it does has a special meaning to me. When I was younger, my dad taught me how to play the piano and we both really love many classical tunes. The keyboard I had was one that taught you how to play and Canon in D was one of the songs on there so me and my dad had a listen and we instantly fell in love with it. Since then, it became my dad's favorite, and it became mine and it is one of the very first classical songs I learned to fully play, chords and all, on the piano just for him. There are many versions of this song with people adding their own lyrics so I won't put lyrics, but I will link some of my favorite versions, some with lyrics, and some with just the music.
Without lyrics here
With lyrics here and Christmas version
So at first I had absolutely no idea what to make out of this song. I had quite a few ideas, but I just didn't know what would be the best. After a while of searching and looking up this song, as well as discussing with my dad for a few ideas, I came up with designing a wedding dress. This song, Canon in D, has been and still is used for a lot of weddings. It is quite a common song for walking down the isle, so I thought it would be very interesting if I used this iconic wedding ballad as a design for a wedding dress.
Below is a part of the sheet music of the song. The notes I used for designing the dress are colored in blue and red. The blue parts are the notes I used to design part of the actual wedding dress, which is the beginning tune to the song. As for the red circles, those are the notes I used to create a veil for the dress. These notes are the bass notes that repeat throughout the entire song.
So for beginning my design, I researched different types of tops, skirts, and veils there are for wedding dresses and drew those out in my mixed media drawing pad. They are just some quick sketches i made to get an idea of what I might want the dress to look like. I also labeled them so I knew what things were. For my sketch of the dress, I took the styles that I liked the most and put those together. I decided that I really liked the top 'illusion' the most as well as the 'trumpet' skirt the most and I put them together. For the veil, I thought it would work better if it was a birdcage type of veil so I used that style. After that, I was a little stuck on how to add the music to the dress, so I found the sheet music above and drew some scales into a journal to get a type of idea of what I could do with the layout of the notes and I noticed that they seem to create a kind of diagonal shape so I added some ruffles in the dress to go along with the notes of the music. I did the same thing for the veil as well.
In the end, after I finished the sketching of the wedding dress, I went and outlined the whole thing with black ink to darken it up and finalize everything. Below is the finished design.
Overall, I am really happy with the outcome of my design. Although I am no professional clothes designer, I think this would not be a bad start for a concept for an actual wedding dress. I am also very happy with the fact that it incorporates one of my favorite songs to not only listen to, but to play on the piano and it brings good memories of practicing the piano with my dad at home.