Sketchs from Sangion: Behind the scenes
Around this time last year I did a picture for a musician from the Isle of Man - Clara Barker. Back in January 2009, Clara posted a bulletin and a blog asking for art inspired by her yet to be released song “Sangion.” I did not immediately reply to the blog. In fact if you do look at the blog you will see a good two months went by until I replied. My thinking was that out of the 10,000+ friends she had, hundreds had to be better and more specialised than me. The moral of the story, don’t hesitate!! Give it a go!! Who knows?! And that goes for anything.
After two months I was getting a little impatient. I thought she was waiting for artwork before posting the song in her player. I thought the picture would be just for that small image in the player. A year later and Clara still hasn’t posted that song on her page :D (although there are a few new ones from her album on there).
I wasn’t really sure what to do for the picture.
During the two months where I didn’t reply I did a few scribbles of clichéd scenes (the usually mushy lovers embrace or what ever), but because I never intended on being part of the project at the time, these scribbles look worse than my doodles.
Because I was so late to the party, Clara already had a few submissions which meant she wasn’t afraid to tell me what she actually expected from my picture. I would have made her tell me what she expected anyway. Basically she wanted the characters to be based on real people (which has in a way become my speciality these days).
Reading the lyrics is very different to actually hearing the song. For some strange reason I imagined it was about the characters battling either a war, the world, or each other’s emotions when they were apart. To give it a Japanese flavour (and because my style isn’t very manga to begin with) I set the image in feudal Japan. I based the samurai uniform on the one Tom Cruise wears in the movie "The Last Samurai." I did a second version of the image where they are wearing more modern clothes, just in case I was going in the wrong direction.
