#I tried some traditional + digital mixed technique here (❁´◡`❁)

[susartwork]

Redraw of my old Inversoswap comic page for funsies! ( o｀ω′)ノ

Inversoswap concept by @artistoons-blog-thing and me OG Inversotale belongs to @nova2cosmos Yosa belongs to @foxalone Ruby belongs to @rubytale-chapter2 Basic belongs to me

The other MxH Fanclub members: @au-mashup-party | @technicolor-chocolate | @crazygemspinz | @parniathedevil (new member!)

[not-xpr-art]

my art inspirations vs my art (2015-now)!

a mini collection of artworks I've done over the years next to the work/artist that I based the style of my piece on!

when I'm basing my work on another artist's piece, I try not to just directly copy the composition, colours or brushstrokes of the original... instead I'm always interested in adapting the original style to my own in order to create more of an homage instead!

another thing I keep in mind is medium, since most of my works above are digital and most of my inspirations are traditional artworks, so I have to figure out how to adapt that artists style into a new format in order to keep it somewhat recognisable to the original!

list of artist inspirations & explanations included in this post are below btw

Gustav Klimt's The Kiss (1907) -> Wangxian digital drawing (2020), with a photo collage background made up of lots of golden things!

This is not the only piece I've done inspired by Klimt's work, but it's one of my favourites hence why I included it here lol! I love how Klimt combines realistically painted portraits with flat coloured backgrounds and patterns, the contrast is just so interesting to look at and is definitely something I use quite regularly in my own work.

Edvard Munch's The Kiss (1897) -> Destiel amalgamation traditional mixed media artwork (2021)

I was also inspired by a few other artworks but the pose is definitely based on Munch's work! I just love how the faces blend into each other that it almost becomes abstract, but is somehow still recognisable as a kiss!

Francis Bacon's 1972 Triptych -> Kaisoo painting (2015)

This is definitely one of the times my inspiration was more based on the ~vibes~ of the artist rather than anything in particular about one specific work lol! (so much so that I only know I based it on that particular triptych cos I wrote about it when I posted the artwork pfft...) Bacon's work isn't necessarily stuff I enjoy looking at (in fact it often makes me kinda uncomfortable), but I do like how expressive his work is!

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's In Bed (1892) -> A study from the film Weekend (2023) (which I haven't actually released properly yet shh you'll have to wait until June for that lol)

I didn't actually initially plan to be an homage to this painting, but about halfway through me drawing it I realised it was reminding me of something lol! Henri's (yes we're on a first name basis cos I cba to write his long ass surname pfft) painting evokes such tenderness, a moment in time commemorated in paint, and it's that same emotion I hope my own work emulates!

Caravaggio's Young sick Bacchus (1593) -> Jimin holding some fruit and flowers lol (2017)

Not the only piece I've done inspired by Caravaggio (or baroque painters in general), but I'm still very proud of this piece, even if the proportions are terrible lol! The chiaroscuro of Caravaggio's work still makes me weep honestly! Plus, kinda weird, but I really love the way he paints grapes lol!

Goosebumps book cover (?? possibly 90s or 00s??) -> BBC Wreck fanart (2022)

I grew up with the Goosebumps books, and though I didn't have this particular publication, I remember absolutely loving the cover art! It's honestly kinda mad it's taken me this long to do an actual Goosebumps based work lol! Also the cheesy taglines are some of my favourite parts of the covers and I spent WAYYY too long trying to come up with my own pfft!

Gwen John's Young woman in a red shawl (1917) -> Luna f(x) fanart (2016)

I remember seeing John's work in Cardiff and just fell in love with her muted colours and rough brushstrokes! I don't think I necessarily echoed her work that well with my own (since it's a difficult technique to do in digital), but I still like it nonetheless lol

Lucian Freud's Guy Half Asleep (1981) -> Park Kyung Instant fanart (2018)

This was actually one of the first times I tried to make an artwork that was done digitally but actually looked like it was traditional! I'd honestly really like to do more work inspired by Freud's cos I love the lumpiness (technical term) of how he paints people! It almost feels like you could reach out and touch their skin when you see his work!

Remedios Varo's Triptych (1960) -> BTS Rapline triptych (2018)

I can't even remember where I saw her work first but I knew that I wanted to do something inspired by her work since I absolutely adored her use of colour and the stylism of her figures and backgrounds! I also really loved how her triptych acts as this journey through each piece, which is something I tried to recreate myself and that Rapline triptych is honestly still one of my favourite pieces I've ever done lol :')

Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper (1495) -> EXO 'last supper in hell' fanart (2019)

This is one where seeing it next to the inspiration is honestly hilarious lol! I was actually more inspired by the music video for Monster, which has a part in it paying homage to Da Vinci's Last Supper btw! I haven't really done much work based on Da Vinci, even though I really like his painting and drawing techniques!

And that's all (for now)! I know I will forever be inspired by artists and artworks of the past (and present) so maybe in a few years I'll do another one of these compilations lol!

[apieters]

War Dance

In This Scene…

In the universe where my lion character, Leo, is Prince of the Savanna, the lions celebrate victories and yearly holidays with war dances that show off their athleticism and martial skills. The male lions are armed with swords and shields, the females twirl spears and shields, and even cubs swing slings, reflecting the weapons they wield in earnest combat. Older lions, past fighting age, play drums, while older lionesses sing and chant.

The lion’s war dance is meant to retell the story of a recent victory or reenact a historical moment. The movements of the dance are stylized versions of combat movements and techniques, more florid and exaggerated. The dancers wear armbands with bells on their arms and ankles; the bells jingle in time with the drums if the dancers are performing their parts correctly.

Here, Prince Leo is performing his part of the war dance, weilding his sword and shield with decorative red ribbons tied to the hilt of his sword and to a stick that he holds in the same hand as his shield, which add a spectacle. His mate, Ariel, painted him in traditional red and blue paint, smearing stripes and geometric designs into his fur. Since he is standing alone, on the outskirts of the village, it’s is probable that he is enacting a moment where he was separated from his comrades and surrounded by enemy warriors, fighting his way back to his fellow lions.

And yes, this is just worldbuilding that I basically made up on the spot. There is actually full a story involving Fantasy!Leo—it’s actually the only story I’ve fully summarized, of the 4-5 that I’m currently brainstorming. Guess I should start doing something with it…

Behind the Scenes

According to my Oma, I am Ambonese on my Opa’s side, and as I’ve tried to research Indonesian history and culture I learned that the Moluccans have a traditional war dance called the cakalele or tjakalele, and according to Wikipedia the war dance simulates a fight between two rival war bands. The dancers usually wear red clothing of some kind (traditionally, a loincloth, but pictures commonly show modern dancers wearing basketball shorts), and most dancers are armed with a traditional klewang sword (like a machete) and a narrow shield called a salawaku. Usually one dancer is armed with a spear, and appears to take on a leadership role in the drama. The dancing is usually accompanied by drums.

I’ve seen videos of this dance on YouTube, and they’re really impressive—the drums are pretty awesome too. My fascination with this dance inspired this picture, which I decided to draw in my physical sketchbook and color. I inked it as an afterthought, as I noticed that the Leo’s outline was a bit too blurry for my taste.

I was only using some old Crayola/Roseart colored pencils left over from my childhood to draw this (I didn’t color much as a kid), so the colors I had available where pretty limited. I ended up blending yellow with some orange and brown to make Leo’s fur, and red and brown to make his kilt. It was an interesting experience creating/mixing my own colors to achieve a desired effect, instead of just dragging a cursor to select what seems right or capturing a pixel—not quite as perfect as digital art, but I feel like I earned something.

[swanlake1998]

Article: Slowly, more men are dancing on pointe, including in Seattle

Date: March 25, 2021

By: Moira Macdonald

The first time Ashton Edwards tried dancing on pointe, it felt like coming home. “It was just like magic. It felt beautiful on pointe. I felt like I could dance forever.”

Edwards, originally from Michigan, has been studying ballet since the age of 4, and is now an 18-year-old student in Pacific Northwest Ballet School’s professional division. Those tentative steps last summer, however, were the dancer’s first: Edwards is male, and in the world of classical ballet, male students traditionally do not receive pointe training. But he dreams of a future as a gender-fluid dancer, dancing all the roles he loves. 

“I would love to do everything that would fit me as a person, not based on my gender but based on what I can do and who I am as a person, who I am as an artist,” he said. 

For those who love ballet, the sight of a ballerina dancing on pointe is an everyday miracle; born from years of training that culminated in ethereal, otherworldly movement. But until recently, the idea of a man dancing on pointe was a rarity, mostly restricted to comic effect in narrative ballets like Frederick Ashton’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” or the all-male dance comedy troupe Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo. In a world engaged in conversation about gender and inclusivity, however, things may be changing in ballet, just a bit.

A Bay Area company, Ballet22, was founded last year with the purpose of breaking gender norms, particularly in the ungendered use of the pointe shoe. James Whiteside, a principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre, makes viral videos of himself dancing — beautifully — on pointe.

And here in Seattle, Edwards is at the center of his own tiptoed revolution: He is the first male professional division student at PNB to take pointe technique classes. “He is quite remarkable on pointe and very committed,” said PNB artistic director Peter Boal. PNB faculty member Marjorie Thompson noted that while some male students borrow friends’ pointe shoes to play around, Edwards is different. “Ashton is a serious young person, and he has a serious desire and he is totally supported at PNB,” she said.

He’s not the only man at PNB who’s comfortable in a pair of pointe shoes. Joshua Grant, a soloist with the company, is a former member of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo. As a Trock, Grant performed for five years on pointe, fascinated by what he saw as the company’s mission to “blur the lines of what is masculine and what is feminine.”

He’s currently choreographing a new work, called “Bright Young Things,” that will debut in June and feature Edwards on pointe — and that reflects his own love of the technique. For that work, he said, his thought process was simple. “I just wanted to put a boy on pointe! Why is it that women get to have all the fun, why don’t boys get all the fun, too?”

Pointe shoes have been around for a couple of centuries, originally born as a stunt. In her book “Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet,” dance historian Jennifer Homans explains that pointe work was first performed by early-19th-century Italian dancers — the first was said to be Amalia Brugnoli — who “blithely hiked themselves onto the tips of their toes and perched there for all to see.” The technique was soon refined by ballet pioneer Marie Taglioni (1804-1884) who smoothed the stunt into something more refined and elegant, darning the toes of her soft slippers to give support.

Later in the century, Italian shoemakers devised the pointe shoe with a hard toe box, made from layers of glue, paper and fabric; it was revised further in the early 20th century, with legendary Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova credited with popularizing a more modern pointe shoe with additional support at the toes and a hard leather sole. But it was nearly always women who wore them, achieving that magical elongating effect. 

Grant remembers being fascinated by the soft thump of pointe shoes when attending ballets as a child. “I loved the sound the shoe made when it hit the floor,” he said. In his youth, he remembered watching ballets and feeling that “men always looked frumpy and dowdy, whereas women looked long and ethereal and weightless.”

When he finally saw his own foot in a pointe shoe, “it just took my breath away,” he said. “There’s something about putting on a pair of pointe shoes that gives me goose bumps.”

Men who want to dance on pointe face some challenges, the most significant of which is finding shoes that fit; men’s feet tend to be proportioned differently, and a woman’s shoe in a bigger size might not work. (It might be a bit easier these days: Two years ago, the first pointe shoe designed specifically for men became available, from the Russian company Siberian Swan.) And a taller, broader body might have more balancing issues — though, as Grant notes, there’s nothing natural about dancing on pointe, no matter what size you are.

Male students taking pointe class is new to PNB’s School, Thompson said, but a young man wanting to go on pointe would have been indirectly trained to do so through regular classes. The challenge is the structure of the feet, the ability to balance, to fully straighten the leg on pointe, to have enough abdominal strength to pull up rather than “sitting into the shoe.” All of these, Thompson said, apply as well to men as to women; some female students struggle with pointe due to issues with their feet.

“I think there’s a lot of misconceptions, that men are not flexible and can’t get on pointe,” said Theresa Knudson, executive director of Ballet22. She noted that in their company, “most of the men have better feet than I do.” At a high professional level, she said, “men and women are equal when it comes to taking class; the split is that the men are lifting and the women are on pointe.”

Edwards, who performed with Ballet22 for a digital show last year, was thrilled by the experience of being able to both dance traditionally female roles and contemporary new work. “It was just men, dancing equally as men on pointe, not trying to be women or trying to fit into any binary standard.”

Might ballet be headed toward a future in which roles aren’t necessarily dictated by gender? Tiny steps are being taken: At the English National Ballet in 2018, male dancer Chase Johnsey (a veteran of the Trocks) made history by performing female roles in the ensemble. Wendy Whelan, now co-head of New York City Ballet, commented at the time that “I don’t care what the body parts are, as long as artistically the dancer makes the choreography shine.” In that same New York Times article, she also expressed concern that ballet is already profoundly competitive for women, with men performing in traditionally female specialties presenting another hurdle.

But along with men dancing on pointe, women can learn what was traditionally called “men’s technique” — powerful jumps and leaps. American Ballet Theatre recently changed the names of its classes from “men’s” and “women’s” to simply “technique” and “technique with pointe,” to facilitate inclusivity, said ABT rep Kelly Ryan. Boal remembered a “legendary” men’s class taught at the School of American Ballet (New York City Ballet’s school) in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, regularly attended by the company’s ballerinas.

And PNB School managing director Denise Bolstad said in an email that female professional division students who request to take men’s technique classes will be allowed to do so, and noted that the school is “talking about mixing up the instructors going forward, men teaching women and women teaching men.”

Looking to the future, Grant thinks it might be a while before we would see gender-fluid casting in traditional ballets, but said it’s already happening in contemporary, nonstory ballets — “say, a plotless ballet with eight dancers, and you go on Friday night and it’s eight women, and on Saturday night it’s eight men.” He believes it’s the job of art to push boundaries, to get audiences a bit uncomfortable, “and then they can ask themselves why they feel uncomfortable. We’ve done our job by making them feel something. I think we’ll get there, eventually. It’ll be an interesting, turbulent flight.”

Meanwhile, Edwards keeps rehearsing, appreciating the support he’s receiving from teachers and fellow students — “all the girls are eager to help me!” And he’s imagining a future in which he might be able to dance “all my dream roles. I want to do Oberon and Titania [in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”]. I would love to explore all of the movement I can do, with no limits or restrictions. In a company, hopefully. Someday.”

[whiteappalachianwitch]

Types of Witches

Originally posted by little-red-grewup

Read about the Updates/Notes:

Hello everyone! Here is the updated version of the WITCH TYPES list, including types that were missed and recommended. Please be respectful if there is some form of misinformation or typo on here; I tried my verybest and took a lot of my own time and energy to do as thorough research as I could with what I have available, which is a very difficult and long task for somebody with low motivation. I am very in favor of constructive and polite criticism, but I will not tolerate people leaving rude comments without even trying to help me fix and provide the best information possible! Thank you so much to everyone who so kindly informed me of what needed to be polished up and fixed, you are all very lovely people for handling it with patience ~ And keep in mind, beginner witches:

You do not NEED to identify yourself as a type

You can choose to identify yourself as NO type at all

You can choose to identify with as many as you like!

Anyway, enjoy! ➺ Rainy

Each type includes a simplified description (for those who haven’t heard of the type, just to get a generalized idea. The shortened description is in no way meant to be discriminative or disrespectful), a few examples, and almost every bolded term includes a link to a (hand-picked) useful post/website for that type of practice.

Types of Witches

(Some may also fit into the second category)

∴.*☆∴.*☆∴.*☆∴.*☆∴.*☆∴.*☆∴.*☆∴.*☆∴.*☆∴.*☆∴.*☆∴.*☆∴.*☆∴.*☆

Solitary - Practicing by ones’ self; not included in a group

Secular - Non-religious / Not connecting with deity(s)

Eclectic - An individual’s practice that has bits and pieces pulled from different magickal and/or spiritual practices, respectfully

(Theistic) Satanic - Witchcraft that is often centered around honoring and/or working with satan in spellwork and prayer

Athiest/Laveyan Satanic - Witchcraft worked with the idea that satan is a concept, rather than a real person or entity (loosely put; it’s a very detailed concept). Also known as Satanic witches who fit the secular description.

Hereditary/Blood - Including oneself in the practice of witchcraft on the grounds of having been born into a family who also practices. Knowledge and practice may also be passed down through generations, and honor old ways of magick

Traditional - One who practices witchcraft by honoring and using old and ‘traditional’ ways of magick; this type of witch might be one to practice modern methods of magick, but they might also stick to traditional concepts or techniques

Christian - Witchcraft that is performed to honor / or is performed in conjunction with the Christian God as the primary and only deity

Hellenic - A form of non-witchcraft practice in which the practicer follows Greek ideals/culture and honors the Greek pantheon

Celtic - Magickal practice that is based from the Celtic culture, including its’ mythology, deities, old ways, and (occasionally) language / symbols. May also describe those who only worship Celtic gods

Science - A form of magick in which both metaphysical ideas and scientific facts/theories are mixed in together by the individual practicer

Types of Witchcraft

Keep in mind that each term’s explaination is the basic description of that type of witchcraft/magick; each individual witch might be a certain type but define it differently, as their practice may be different from the next witch

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Green - Utilizing greenery/plants/herbs/flowers in herbal and natural magick, such as creating blends of different plants or using primarily herbs in spellwork

Hedge - Also known as an astral title, a type of magick that is oriented around more spiritual work; astral travel/projection, lucid dreaming, spirit-work, healing, and out-of-body experiences are all practices included in this magick

Dream - (A possible variation of Hedge) Mindful and internal magickal practice mainly based from interpreting dreams and/or engaging in lucid dreaming. Those who intensify as this may “de-code” symbols and messages in the dream world similar to how one would use a divination technique.

Sea - A type of magick derived from materials and abstract ideas involving the ocean and oceanic world. Sea/Ocean magick can be worked using seashells and bones, sea weed, beach sand, driftwood, ocean water, etc. and a sea witch might draw their energy from that of the sea!

Storm/Weather - Magick that is worked by combining one’s energy with the energy of the weather, and most commonly rain. Weather witches will do things like collect rain/snow water, absorb the energy of a lightning storm, “whistle up” or manipulate wind, predict the weather, etc.

Cottage / Hearth - (A slight variation from kitchen) Magick that is weaved, worked, or embued into mundane tasks around the house or for loved ones. Cottage/Hearth magick may be worked into daily tasks such as cleaning, cooking, or any hobbies

Kitchen - Magick that is worked specifically through “kitchen craft” such as herbal mixtures, brewing, baking, and cooking, and honors many aspects of the natural world: including herbs, crystals, fey, and the elements

Tea - Those who drink tea, make tea, use tea-leaf divination, or enjoy blending herbal remedies! A variant of Kitchen/Cottage witch

Tech - Magick that is skillfully worked through technology! A tech witch will most likely have at least a few magickal apps on their phone, digital sigils, or an online/digital BoS and/or Grimoire

Garden - While having a garden and/or working in any type of garden; magick that is mostly (if not all) herbal and botanical-related! Garden witches take pride and find it calming or invigorating to work the earth, harvest that which they have planted, and are closely related to Green type

Elemental - Magick that is worked by honoring/acknowledging the 4 or all 5 elements: Water, Earth, Air, Fire, and Spirit. Commonly an Elementalist will dedicate different areas of their altars to each element, call upon them during spells and rituals, and use symbols to represent each

Water - Specifically centered on the element of Water; water scrying, collecting sea/storm/snow/river/spring water, swimming/bath spells and other water-related actives, creating and using symbols associated with water

Earth - Specifically centered on the element of Earth; grounding exercises, rock/soil collecting, strong appreciation of the natural world, creating and using symbols associated with earth

Air - Specifically centered on the element of Air; working with wind, using air-related tools (such as the wand), creating and using symbols associated with air

Fire - Specifically centered on the element of Fire; Using anything fire-related (bonfires, candles, burning objects) in most spellwork, creating and using symbols associated with fire

Flora - Much like a Green or Garden witch, those who work majorily with floral materials and flowers in their practice and in their spellwork! Their grimoire may be heavily associated with flowers rather than herbs, and likewise, one might use flower properties in spell or craft work.

Urban Primative/City - For those who live or prefer the urban/city lifestyle; magick that can be worked without the seemingly “traditional” ways of witchcraft

Faery/Fey - Magick for those who communicate and work with the fey during spells and rituals. Usually, those who work with the fey may also leave offerings regularly, as thanks for the assistance of a faery in their spellwork.

Spirit Working - A practice in which the person will perform spellwork in conjunction with or with the help of any manner of spirit. This includes Ouija, (sometimes) demon spirits, spiritual contact, etc.

Draconian - Refers to type of magick for those who call upon or work with dragons and dragon imagery in their practice; whether it be through astral matters or in spells and rituals

Seasonal - Witches who utilize and draw energy from the specific times of year for their magick, sort of how a person might have a strong love or connection to a certain time of year! This can also be spread out into Winter, Autumn, Spring and Summer witches

Embroidery / Sewing / Knit - One who embues magick into household “stitching” or “string” hobbies such as embroidery, sewing, knitting, stringing, and knotting ~ Basically, one who identifies with using knot or chord magick in many different skills

Paper - Magick that is worked with, essentially, paper! Burning paper written with sigils, chants, symbols or spells, creating magickal offerings, items, or sachels from paper, etc.

Music - Magick that is worked with music, musical chimes, or rhythm! Humming/singing, clapping, singing chants during spells, playing instruments (even simple ones, like the triangle or bells), or even just simply playing music during spellwork, magick, or during energy exercises are a few common things a music witch might fancy

Chaos/Chaotic - A type of magick utilizing new, non-traditional, and unorthodox methods. It is a new and highly individualistic practice, while still drawing from other common forms of magick.

Animal - (A variant of Green) Magick that is strongly tied to the animal kingdom, which includes a deep appreciation for all animals, and most often: usage of animal materials in spellwork. An animal witch will most likely be one who loves animals, a person who animals are immediently “drawn” to, and those who appreciate the natural world. Some animal witches might also use bones, wings, feathers, fur, skin, scales, (etc). from deceased animals in their magick, if they choose to do so.

Sanguine - Meaning “blood” or “blood red color” in Latin, a type of magick that deals with blood or other life giving fluid; life blood can also be represented through things such as water, or nutrients. A term for those who work with blood and life-oriented magick!

Sigil - A witchcraft working majorly with sigils, and the intent that can be put into them to active their power

Art/Craft - Witchcraft that can be worked through arts and crafts, simply put! One may embue macgick in creative activities such as painting, drawing, building, cutting, creating, etc.

Grey - A neutral witch, who practices magick that neither benefits or harms others. Grey magick may also both harm and benefit at the same time, balancing and neutralizing.

Bone - Witches who commonly collect, clean, and use animal bones in their magickal practice, and for things like altar decoration or magick-infused charms/jewelry. Materials used by those who identify as Bone witches are usually collected peacefully or after the being has passed on naturally!

Lunar - One who works magick with / honors the moon and it’s energy and phases. This type of witch is also one to favor casting magick during the night hours rather than during the day

Astronomy/Space - (A wider variant of lunar) Those who practice magick and correlate their beliefs in conjunction with the planets and stars! These witches may focus their magick with the properties of each planet, regularly read a horoscope or study astrology, and have a love of the stars and the night.

Energy - Those who prefer to do magick through energy exercises and manipulation rather than with many physical tools or materials; using the enhanced power of the mind and the body’s natural energies to bring about a magickal result or feeling. (Also may include aura work)

Crystal - Magick that is worked commonly with stones and crystals, such as during spellwork or for crystal healing techniques. This may also include chakra balance, crystal meditation… anything that uses crystals, really! A crystal witch may also have an extensive knowledge of stones, including how to identify them and using their properties.

Literary - Those who practice magick through books and literature; a literary witch may do thing such as using book divination, often study witchcraft/magick even after the “beginner” phase of learning, etc. Also a term used to describe witches in stories, books, or movies.

The following information was kindly given by lovely bedaelia! Her descriptions were so well-written, I decided to simply use her own)

Heathenry - a practice in which the individual follows, works with, and/or worships the Norse deities

Lokean - Someone who works with/worships Loki and/or any of his relations (Hel, Jormugandr, Sigyn, Angrboda, etc) ; does not exclude other deities.

Odinism - A faith that works mostly with Odin, Thor, Freyjr, Freyja, Frigga, and Heimdall.

Asatru - Literally “Faith in the [Old] Gods” it is a more specific branch of Heathenry that worships the major Nordic pantheon, minus Loki, Fenrir, or other “adversary” gods.

More on Heathen Denominations

Gaulish - A practice that involves worshipping Gaulish gods

Kemetic - Worshipping and working with Egyptian deities

Death/Necromancy - A practice that may combine Bone, Animal, Spirit work, occasionally also Blood. Using spirits to empower one self, hoarding bones, using graveyards, graves, the spirits of them, as well as the dirt (or even plants) that are found in them. May also honor the dead and/or gods who work with the dead. Also try this link.

Pop Culture - Uses pop culture as a main focus or inspiration for the craft. Using lyrics or movie lines in spells, worshipping and honoring pop culture icons or idols, use of fandom, and more. It is a very wide practice. Examples may include drawing from Harry Potter spells or using invented sigils from shows like Supernatural.

“Poison Path” - Working with plants, herbs, other items that may be poisonous, deadly, cause hallucinogenic effects, or affect the mind or body in some way (sometimes aphrodisiacs are included [?])

Desert - Using and utilizing the desert environment. Lots of work with hardier plants such as Cacti or Tumbleweeds. Use of the moon, desert earth, fire, rare water (especially rainwater), wind, local plants and herbs, as well as animals/creatures of the desert such as snakes, spiders, scorpions, and so on.

Swamp/Bog - Heavy use of water and moisture, rich we soil/mud, sometimes incorporates the use of bones, animals, and insects, especially the local plants of the Swamp

Types of Spellwork / Magick

Each term below includes a link to a resource of that specific type ~

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Candle

Herb

Crystal

Knot / Chord

Color

Energy Manipulation

Bottle / Jar

Vocal (Chanting)

(Physical) Binding

Poppet

Glamour

[irisadielsart]

As anyone can attest, 2020 has been a rough year. A punctuated rough year in a string of rough years. My experience has been no different, but as for my personal artistic growth, 2020 has actually been exceptionally good to me. I went from thinking that doing a picture a month was asking way too much, to doing basically a drawing everyday. It’s a bit funny, I’ve been on tumblr since 2012, and i’ve posted some art here and there, but this year is when people finally noticed. I’ve had a couple of people say to me “I didn’t know you did art.” I don’t know how I feel about that, but I’m happy that my art is finally getting notes at least.

January - This is when i’m still in my dark phase. Drawing hurts, but I’m still trying my best to put something, ANYTHING on paper. i’ve spent 2019 drawing lines and squares on paper to just get used to drawing again. I’m trying to do people again. I had an idea that i was going to do a drawing a month for birth month flowers. January was carnation, and i had a sketch for February, but it never made it to completion. I’m still using traditional markers, pen and pencil.

February - This is where I found out that using a reference for art made things %100 percent easier. This is my very old OC Zora, made when i was in middle school. Using references cut out a lot of the initiation process i had when starting a drawing, all I had to do was trace, i didn’t have to think at all and the product was still good. Honestly pretty revelatory.

March - this is when i bought some really neat artists models that i could pose in any number of ways. They have proved their worth over and over again. Still doing traditional, but i did enhance this picture on the computer. 

April - My markers were running really dry and I couldn’t afford to buy a new set, so I dragged out my laptop and drawing tablet to see if i could start drawing digitally. I was never really good at drawing digitally, though I got a little better in my animation classes. Colors aren’t true on the monitor and doing lineart feels odd and hollow. i can’t put it into words. but I downloaded Krita because i also couldn’t afford Photoshop. so on top of learning digital art again, i was learning a whole new program. So this picture was a culmination of a lot of things, and a really good first step for the rest of the year.    

May - Here, this is when quarantine was in full swing, but drawing is no longer painful and i’m actually looking forward to it. Still learning digital again, so I decided to go with my tried and true love of fashion and clothes because that’s what i know best. Backgrounds suck

June - This month i was doing a lot of sketches and little doodle drawings. i decided that i wanted to try something more realistic, just to see how it would turn out. i think it is a bit of a mixed success.

July- July was busy, so i didn’t do a whole lot. This drawing was based off the designs of another artist that i loved a lot. I’m really big into character design, and I go crazy over a really good design.

August - My busiest month! I did so much in August! i wanted to take a break from all the Zelda art I was doing and decided to try doing an Alucard. Yoshitaka Amano is a big inspiration for me, and the way they do Alucard absolutely melts me. Someday i’ll draw Alucard as pretty as Amano does. 

September - I dragged another OC out of the grave and thought to myself “How can i improve on my art?”. It’s amazing that in January i didn’t know if i would still be drawing, but here I am trying to not only draw as much as i can, but also trying to improve. I loved the way this picture came out, but the process that i used to color it took 3 days! I don’t have that kind of time to spend on my art, but maybe someday i’ll do that technique again.

October - This month was a bit of a low point for me. I was getting depressed again and was struggling to draw. I didn’t do a whole lot. But i didn’t want to go back to the way things were at the start of the year, so i just took a break for myself and reminded myself that low points were going to happen, but it didn’t mean that my progress was erased. i went back to trying a more realistic approach because with LOTR characters, i can use actual human models which is great for getting the subtleties of shading.

November - Busy month that i didn’t have a lot of time to draw for. but i did a series that I am very fond of, the picture shown being my favorite of the series.

December - the end of the year! and i’m still drawing. I’m drawing so much! December isn’t over yet, and I’ll have more drawings to show later, but i can’t show them here yet because a lot of them are presents. so, this picture is the one that everyone liked the best, or at least it got the most notes. instead of using my usual ultra saturated color, i went with greys and sad colors. but people liked it a lot, and i don’t know how to feel about that. 

[mysticsparklewings]

Light in the Darkness

For Qinni. May she Rest In Peace. ____

I'm sure many of you have heard the news by now, but in case you haven't: Qinni passed away on February 8th, after years of struggle with a heart condition and a relatively new cancer diagnosis. The first tweet I saw saying she'd passed...I thought it was a mistake or some kind of sick joke. She'd said in recent updates she was estimated to have a year, year and a half. That was one of my first thoughts, She was supposed to have another year. But, sadly, it wasn't a mistake. And soon, everywhere online was alight with those of us that had been touched in some way by Qinni's work. She is gone, but she is not forgotten. I never knew Qinni personally, but she was one of the first really popular artists I found myself drawn to here on dA. And a lot of my artistic style circa 2016 was influenced by her work, though I don't think I realized it at the time. This includes the artwork I would go on to make into the wallpaper I use for my banners all over social media. And thus, it only made sense to use that piece as a reference for this tribute piece. A piece that I had to drop everything to make, despite whatever else I had planned. I also decided to draw on an idea I'd been thinking about for a while; the original idea being a mermaid wearing a space helmet, but the helmet is also a fishbowl. I didn't include the mermaid part here, as I mainly wanted to focus on space and star themes since those are elements that Qinni's art is really known for. (Although, after having spent some time going through her gallery and social media posts, it seems the Little Mermaid was a subject she frequented too, so it still would've worked, I think.) I started with a sketch, using My Fantasy, My Insanity for a reference for the face as I mentioned, and some graphics from pixabay.com for the helmet. I did modify the hair to be more like Qinni's, made the eyes match, and turned the previously neutral mouth into more of a smile, but other than that the basic lines are largely the same. At some point, though I'm not really sure where the idea came from, I had the idea to do the whole sketch of the face out like a constellation. (My original plan had been to just have a galaxy in the blank space between the face and the helmet or just do the hair that way.) This is something I'd never tried doing before, so I stopped and did a couple of test pieces to see if what I wanted to do would be possible traditionally. I knew it would be digitally, but I wanted to stick largely to a traditional piece since Qinni became known for her watercolor work. Fortunately, those test pieces turned out really nicely, aside from me discovering watercolor paper was my better bet over mixed media for the gradient effects I wanted (which in hindsight I really should've seen coming, but this is why I did separate tests in the first place). And I will be posting these test pieces at a later time since they did work out well, talking more about how I figured out the process I'm about to go over as relates to each of those. With those tests done, I was finally able to start on the actual artwork. (Although I did stop a few more times as I went to do other tests.) I started by scanning the sketch in and booting it into Paint Tool Sai to break it down into the more simple lines and spaces I'd need, like making a connect-the-dots puzzle in reverse. First I just went over the sketch with connected (but straight) lines, making corners at curves, and then I made a new layer and broke those lines down a bit farther, leaving dedicated spaces at certain corners and where lines intersected for stars later. Then I printed off the lines and, after inking the helmet onto watercolor paper (including the ink-technique shading), used my lightbox and a ruler to carefully trace the face lines into the helmet. I taped down the edges of the paper, covered the shine spots on the helmet near the face space just to be on the safe side, and then got to work with painting. It may not look like much, but I spent a long time going back and forth with the paint to get the blending and colors right. I wanted just the right amount of pink, just the right amount of blue. A little dark over here, but lighter over there. Lots of blending and lifting involved. As is typical of me, I'd put paint on, blend it out, then put more on and start the cycle again. But eventually, I found the right balance and got something I was happy with. (And fortunately, I was smart enough to use some of my 100% cotton watercolor paper to make this process easier; it would not have blended this nicely over this large of an area if I'd used anything else.) That had to dry overnight since by the time I finished with it, it was approaching 4 in the a.m. and I was exhausted. The next day, I used a ruler and a white gel pen to go back over the constellation lines and make the notable stars (dots) attached to/connecting them. As well as I used a yellow Gelly Roll moonlight pen to place yellow stars in certain places, a specific nod to the stars in many of Qinni's artworks. After I'd given the gel pen a few minutes to dry, I pulled out the white gouache and got busy splattering to really bring home the galaxy look. And then after that, I went in with some PanPastel to give the lines a glow so they'd pop a little more. It was good, but even after I filled in the two top elements on the helmet to be black to balance a little better (they'd just been cross-hatched before), it still wasn't quite what I wanted. I'd known for a while I was going to be taking out the extra white of the paper background in Photoshop, so I decided if I had time (it was a busy few days surrounding this artwork's creation) I would try fixing the yellow stars in Photoshop and maybe a few other experiments to finalize it. This turned out to be a good thing, as just as I was finishing up the now-digital stars, I realized I'd completely forgotten one of the main elements I'd wanted to include: The fish!   And to be honest, I'm still not sure how that happened. They just totally slipped my mind during the initial planning and testing phases.   But since I was already there, it wasn't too hard to pull up some of Qinni's artwork as a reference and draw a few fish in digitally, then turn down the opacity a little so the orange wouldn't be too overbearing. And that worked out, as originally the piece had still felt kind of empty somehow. The fishies fill in some of the more bare spots pretty nicely. There are a million other little ideas or tweaks I could do if I went back in and gave myself more time, but it's already more than what I had imagined. And I can fiddle with it all I want, but all the art in the whole world that I could ever make will never fully express my gratitude towards Qinni and my sorrow that she's gone. That one of the brightest lights in the art community has moved from earth to the stars. Qinni's work reminds me of one of my favorite poems by FridgePoetProject (another wonderful artist that passed away all too soon), The Daily Magnet #106, which reads, "You write love into my eyes with starry ink." Although, perhaps it would be more appropriate to say she painted it into our hearts with starry watercolor. Rest In Peace, Qinni. <3 ____ Artwork (c) me, MysticSparkleWings

[donupfield74955-blog]

Hop Is The Greatest Music Genre

The previous few years have been something of a golden age for music documentaries, with the Oscar-profitable success of Trying to find Sugar Man and 20 Ft From Stardom opening up the field for films about less obvious stars. The top-down technique begins by laying out the tremendous-genres, usually in a chronologic order. This creates a two-dimensional area where the horizontal axis determines the tremendous-genre and the vertical axis determines the time. The result is a rigid structure with adjoining super-genres through which each genre is placed on some extent (or collection of factors) that automatically dictates the corresponding tremendous-genre and year of origin. Frith, Simon (1996) Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard College Press. As soon as known as Nation & Western music, this music kind is developed mostly in the southern United States of America, with roots in conventional folks music, spirituals and blues. Possibly the clearest lower set of definitions of music genres is present in award conditions, http://www.audio-transcoder.com resembling in the Grammy Awards. In this context, the genres are primarily based on a wide range of criteria — for instance, Different" is based on what the music shouldn't be; Youngsters's" relies on the viewers; Musical Show" is predicated on type; and many others. — which are applied persistently and over time in order that a practice of definition is constructed up.

Reggae music has its roots in a Jamaican music style called Ska, primarily based on R&B, Jazz and Caribbean musical traditions. Ska originated in the 1960s, and later spawned the world-well-known genre of Reggae. After I think of metalcore I think of: as I lay dying, august burns crimson, parkway drive, trivium, unearth. great bands who made superior music. The battleground upon which many a skirmish in the alt-tradition wars would be fought. Witch Home had the excellence of being one of many few hipster genres that, like high elves denying the rise of Sauron, even many die-hard hipsters refused to acknowledge as being actual. Seems it did not matter either means, because by the time Salem managed to release an album, all their imitators had either signed to Tri Angle or moved on to rave music.

Electronic dance music is a popular music supposed for dance in golf equipment. The music has repetitive beat and synthesized backtrack. For the reason that starting of music, many people have been listening to numerous forms of them. The varieties are on account of traditions, hustle, musical instruments, pitch loudness and different parameters. Completely different music varieties have their intervals via which they flourish and develop into most outstanding. Initially, style affected just one or few societies or nations, however in the present day music and style are frequent internationally. Listed below are the several types of EDM.

Hip-Hop style is nearly uniquely recognized as a single topic (subject 2). The remainder of the music genres seem to be identified as another matter. On the International Music Summit Ibiza, we introduced our first wave of Artist Ambassadors who might be giving their time and influence freed from charge to support The Affiliation For Electronic Music and its campaigns. Songs like these integrated components of each disco and synthpop and paved the way for synthpop to stand on its own as a dance music subgenre. This track is extra of a precursor to future bass than the precise thing, but I'm including it as a result of it's an necessary touchstone in the music's early growth. Bristol, England, producer Liam McLean referred to as his gritty mutation of dubstep "purple sound" (a term he's since distanced himself from), and its mixture of buzzy synths and slowed-down, hip-hop-influenced beats was a direct affect on numerous future bass producers, particularly youthful artists equivalent to Denver's Gunskt and London's Digital Mozart, who sometimes convey slightly more swagger and menace to their sound. The quality of Uncover Weekly's picks is so consistently good, it's kind of uncanny. After I obtained a number of excellent playlists in a row, I couldn't cease desirous about how Spotify had figured me out, together with 75 million other people. Answering that query led me down the rabbit hole of how the system works in the first place—and how an algorithm can delve into the deeply subjective realm of music to predict the songs that can make my pulse race and my head nod. Music comes from everywhere, and so do the names we name it by. There is a longstanding cliche that solely the music enterprise wants genre names - everybody else either likes it or they do not. That is, after all, bunk, as anybody who's heard sufficient folks trot out lines equivalent to "I like all music aside from rap and country" is aware. Not least because quite a lot of these genre names come from the artists themselves. The Beatles didn't stop touring till the summer time of 1966, but a yr earlier, on Rubber Soul, you'll be able to hear them deciding to make the recording studio their home. The harmonies had been trickier, the recording techniques extra thought of, and the instrumentation more diversified as the band expanded upon the standard rock band format they'd established. Maybe the sitar stood out essentially the most on the time, however dig all these pianos, usually electronically tweaked, most notably to impersonate a harpsichord on "In My Life." The lyrics were both more acerbic and allusive, questioning yesterday's romantic optimism. You may say this represents "maturity," name it "art" or credit score it for transferring rock away from singles to album-size statements — however regardless Rubber Soul accelerated popular music's creative arms race, driving opponents like the Stones, the Seashore Boys and Dylan to dismantle expectations and create new ones. Our sense of the place one genre" ends and another begins, Wald argues, is time-contingent: a product of our cultural moment. Maybe you don't suppose the Beatles are in charge for fashionable music turning into organized along the traces of arbitrary, https://www.goodreads.com/ often racist terminology (what number of completely different phyla of African-American music have been loosely bracketed into the soul" class?) devised by label A&Rs, promoters, report retailer clerks, and so on. But surely most would agree that genre tags are sometimes poisonous , or on the very least, misleading.There was a wonderous flicker of hope that started in the early 2000s. We noticed bands like Linkin Park , Nickel Back & Evenescence give technique to other acts comparable to My Chemical Romance, Him, Taking back Sunday, Hinder and plenty of others. Although not typical, it was glorious to my ears to right here any of those acts vs. most important stream "blah-blah" music. The quiet but forceful nature of Assured Individualists is clearly reflected of their selection of music: these personalities scored highest for classical (76%), rock (79%, tied with Fixed Improvement), and metallic (42%) genres. One can easily think about them finding one thing interesting in both harmonious and technically demanding classical passages, and intense rock or metal tracks. Some may even mix the two, embracing symphonic steel, for instance.

[raj-illustration]

So, long story short, this month we had to stay inside for like 3 weeks basically because of the toxic smoke in the air from the Camp Fire, and during that time apparently we used so much internet that we actually nearly capped our data plan, hahaha. And like, we’ll be OK so long as we don’t watch netflix or videos until the end of the month (and I’ll still be streaming on Friday, that should be fine) but, I decided with this oodles of extra time this weekend of not watching stuff to read up on color theory, and picked up “Color and Light” by James Gurney, who goes over this color choosing method called Gamut Mapping.

Sounds more complicated than it is, but I decided to try it out on everyone’s favorite professional moleman Marik here. Skin tone is a little tricky because I can only mix with the four colors that are the points of the map I made for myself on this Yurmby color wheel (and it must be a Yurmby one, which I didn’t know was a thing until I read this book), but it came out pretty convincing, actually. Especially since I cheated and put most of it in shadow.

kinda neat whenever you get a crossover from a traditional art technique that slides into digital like this. I’ll have to continue with this method some more to get a hang of it, but I like how easy it is to make something cohesive, so if you have not tried Gamut Mapping--it’s a good time.

[takkarulz]

I posted 324 times in 2021

55 posts created (17%)

269 posts reblogged (83%)

For every post I created, I reblogged 4.9 posts.

I added 290 tags in 2021

#hxh - 50 posts

#one piece - 49 posts

#takka fanarts - 34 posts

#one piece fanart - 30 posts

#hxh fanart - 30 posts

#hunter x hunter - 26 posts

#phantom troupe - 20 posts

#<3 - 18 posts

#uwu - 17 posts

#hunter x hunter fanart - 16 posts

Longest Tag: 120 characters

#as a phantom troupe enthusiast and former museum guide and museum lover in general i love this so much that is unreal...

My Top Posts in 2021

#5

CI know that is strange but I can´t get out of my brain the headcannon/theory that Chrollo´s tattoo is in his head, hidden by his hair and that unless he shaves himself (or suffers some kind of severe mental crisis like Knov) we will never see it. Which is good since Chrollo hair is lovely (tho I think he would still look very hot without it, lol). In fact, this is kind of a remake of an older sketch that I had already posted here. 

Bonus, the reaction of the rest of the Phantom Troupe after seeing Chrollo´s tattoo:

30 notes • Posted 2021-07-30 18:33:06 GMT

#4

Me and my aspie brain after spending way too much time checking out HxH fanfiction: Phinks and Shizuku are not stupid, both of them are way smarter than the way in which HxH fandom portraits them, they are creative, sensitive and somewhat cultured. Shizuku likes to read and Phinks named one of his abilities after a kind of particle accelerator, they are obviously cultured and intelligent persons. But probably they are seen as dumb cuz Shizuku has memory issues, Phinks is very impulsive and both seem to have a short attention span, which could be because both of them have untreated and undiagnossed adhd and their symptoms have only worsened over the time due the lack of mental health facilities in Meteor City and it is highly implied that Shizuku may have another mental illness or disability that causes her memory problems...

Me also: These motherfuckers probably ate Play-Doh at least twice cuz the package had a sticker that said “Not Toxic”.

30 notes • Posted 2021-08-24 20:00:55 GMT

#3

Ugly HxH headcannon time!

Phinks follows a strictly vegetarian diet since he was a kid and he sometimes can be the stereotypical preachy and self righteous vegetarian that always says that his diet is the best of the world and that everyone else is weak and unhealthy cuz they keep eating greasy meat and KFC instead of homemade beans and veggies and he keeps preaching his diet to all the Phantom Troupe members to the point of being annoying.  

So when Uvogin defeats Phinks on the arm wrestling contest of the Troupe, Phinks is super pissed off that he started to punch holes at the wall and cursing like sailor and didn´t talk to anyone in the rest of the day (the rest of them keep joking about that for weeks).

To add salt to Phinks´ injury Uvogin diet is a MACHO-MAN-MEAT-EATER-WHO-HUNTS-EVERYTHING-HE-EATS-DIET (unless it is beer or anything that Nobunaga is eating lol) and is constantly showing off his SUPER MACHO FRESHLY KILLED MEAT DIET to everyone at point of being ridiculous (plus, Machi is always warning him to eat less cholesterol and avoid eating road kill or weird stuff).

31 notes • Posted 2021-02-07 20:03:26 GMT

#2

44 notes • Posted 2021-11-23 02:21:37 GMT

#1

A bit of surreal Phantom Troupe fanart!

I tried to do something a bit surreal and experimental here, mixing up traditional and digital media and using new shading techniques... 

I´m quiet in love with the final product, I think it looks neat!  

55 notes • Posted 2021-04-06 21:15:35 GMT

Get your Tumblr 2021 Year in Review →

[lindsay36ho]

Tonebase – Catching the Moment

Interview With tonebase’s Piano Executive Ben Laude

In late 2019, tonebase Piano was launched, with the aim of giving amateur pianists access to high level music education through premium online content featuring great artists. Since then, education has been trending even more in a digital direction because of the pandemic. Piano Street’s Patrick Jovell has talked to Ben Laude about the challenges he faced building tonebase’s piano platform, but also about how to forge a unified music education, reconciling our physical and virtual realities.

Piano Street: Dear Ben, thank you for letting us interview you! From what I know you are responsible for the Piano at Tonebase. But you are not alone. I could count fifteen people working in your team. Among the founders I find Chris Garwood who is a guitarist. Can you tell me how it all started and how it has developed?

Ben Laude: First of all, thank you Patrick and to everyone at Piano Street for the resources you’ve been providing us pianists for decades now! I used to frequent the forums back in my conservatory days, mostly looking to pick fights with people about whose Rach 3 recording was the greatest (it was Horowitz and Reiner from 1951, I was convinced).

I joined tonebase in medias res about two years ago with a simple mandate: build the piano platform. The model I had at the time was tonebase’s original pilot classical guitar platform, which had been launched in 2017. Our three founders met at Yale, where two of them (Chris Garwood and Igor Lichtmann) were pursuing their master’s in guitar. They took their ‘Music and Business’ course more seriously than most, it seems, and ended up with a germ of a business plan. They connected with a comp-sci/econ double major whiz kid (Abhi Nayar), and the three of them officially founded tonebase in the summer of 2017. Their savvy and initial success led to getting involved with some Silicon Valley investors, with whom they secured funding to expand to another instrument. Piano was the obvious choice. At the time I was hired, I was busy teaching and performing, and continued to assist David Dubal in curating his NYC piano performance series (a gig I had going back to my early grad work at Juilliard). I figured it was time to put the doctorate I earned in piano to proper use, and had started applying to tenure-track jobs in higher ed when the call for a tonebase ‘Head of Piano’ fell into my lap. It seemed a bit too good to be true, as I’ve had a second passion for media production dating back to high school, especially video editing. I’ve always enjoyed Bruno Mosaingeon’s interviews at the piano with Glenn Gould and wished more films like this existed with more pianists.

Ben Laude performing in concert

My first six months at tonebase were a mad scramble to recruit as many high calibre pianists and professors as I could and coordinate productions on various repertoire and pianistic topics. Garrick Ohlsson was one of the first major artists to say ‘yes’ – he and I met for coffee in New York the summer of 2019 and got lost in conversation about piano. He was clearly a great fit for our longform style of in-depth tutorial videos, and I owe a lot to him for being willing to contribute lessons to our launch. The next big challenge was organizing our post-production workflow with my teammates – editing the video and adding corresponding scores and workbooks to the platform. (I watched Ohlsson teach Chopin’s First Ballade and Third Scherzo over and over again for so many hours while editing those lessons, that I must have learned both pieces by osmosis – they’re now in my active repertoire and I can’t account for that based on practice-time alone.) We launched in late 2019 with about 30 videos and to-date we’re approaching 300 released, plus dozens more in our backlog waiting to be processed and released.

2020 was a bittersweet. It started off in January and February with some unforgettable productions, including two extended sessions with Leon Fleisher, just months before he passed. While Covid led to a higher demand for streaming services, it also became quite difficult to continue productions as before. I also began to direct my energies towards developing foundational musicianship content, beginner courses, and live programming, while continuing to pursue new collaborations with great concert artists and professors where possible. 2021 couldn’t have arrived soon enough. Our subscriber count has by now risen to over 5000; among our active users, about 40% are ‘serious amateurs’, 40% teachers/professionals, and another 20% or so younger students. We’re aiming to keep pace with our expanding base as we grow, and continue to provide a really exceptional and unique product to pianists of very different backgrounds. There’s also some major concert artists who will be added to our roster soon, including a few based in the UK/EU, and I look forward to producing with them later this year (hopefully in person, fingers crossed). We’re still a young platform, and I’m excited to see where we can go from here.

PS:You are a Juilliard trained pianist and you also function as a tutor, also on Tonebase. Which key questions on piano playing and interpretation have you nourished through the years and which come out in your function as a Masterclass moderator?

BL: While at Juilliard I grew fascinated by one of the core questions, or mysteries, of piano playing: that is, what is the relation between physical technique and musical expression. The more I investigated the problem, the more I discovered that musicianship training – i.e., deeply internalizing musical relationships in one’s mind, ear, and voice – can foster better interpretive ideas while also contributing directly to overcoming physical obstacles. In my tonebase lessons, I’ve tried to emphasize the importance of integrating music theory and aural skills into our practice at the keyboard, and we’ve been releasing more and more practical musicianship content for our users’ benefit.

These musicianship subjects are often taught in isolation, especially in the American conservatory systems I’m familiar with, so that your typical piano major will sleep through music theory class on Monday, mumble through solfege exercises on Tuesday, and show up on Wednesday for a private lesson. This results in an unfortunate separation between the intellectual comprehension of harmony and form, the aural recognition of musical relationships, and the physical realization of these principles in performance. (I should also mention a vital fourth element, the study of music history and culture, which takes place on Thursday and is forgotten about by the weekend!) It is no wonder why so many one-sided musicians have emerged from this state of affairs. How often have we encountered a pianist with “great technique, but nothing to say” or with “great ideas, but no chops,” or those who have great ears or analytical minds but never applied them at the piano?

Producer and tutor. Ben Laude is also featured in instruction videos at Tonebase.

The remedy, I have found, is a kind of well-rounded musicianship training where playing the piano is treated as a means for developing your musical personality, rather than as an end in itself. I don’t claim to know the best way to get there! But, I have familiarized myself with some traditions that I believe can help a great deal – for one, I’ve always found Nadia Boulanger’s method of keyboard skills training, with solfege and harmonic analysis mixed in, to be very useful. (The first time I ever performed Bach without a memory slip came after painstakingly working through the Fugue phrase-by-phrase, singing one voice while playing the others, then switching.) Committing to such training transforms our connection to the instrument, and over time a kind of holistic awareness starts to develop, which is just awesome. It becomes nearly impossible to play a given figuration or progression on the piano without hearing its component elements and knowing something about how they relate. Scores can be processed faster and memorization becomes much more rapid and reliable. Furthermore, these new sensitivities instantly inform how passages might be played, conjuring all sorts of possibilities about voicing, texture, phrasing, rubato, etc. Physically, the instrument begins feeling more like an extension of your arm, hand, and fingers, relieving tension and promoting facility.

There’s much more to this, but these are the basic contours of a kind of “musical fluency” at the keyboard that I believe all pianists should develop more thoroughly (including myself!), and which I hope to spread through tonebase.

PS: The line-up of artists and pedagogues on Tonebase is impressive as are the productions in question. The technology used is a proof of your ambition to give the viewer the best possible chance to get into the contents of the Masterclasses. One easily thinks about carefully directed momenta in order to secure the core message. As a “stage director”, how do you manage the different artists and personalities which all have their own fields of expertise and own articulated artistic/pedagogical universes?

Leon Fleisher teaching pianist Rachel Naomi Kudo Brahms’ B-flat major Piano Concerto.

BL: Pianists can be temperamental, particular people, and each of the artists on tonebase has a singular vision at the instrument that has been honed over decades. I’m lucky to work with one pianist at a time, since their perspectives often rub against each other. In some cases, they appear to be in direct opposition. For example, Leon Fleisher preached a rhythmically-strict, architectural approach to building phrases; Jerome Lowenthal insisted on a rhythmically flexible, narrative approach to interpretation. Who is right? Both, and neither, I suppose. What matters to me is that both have the floor, and are given a platform to demonstrate and defend their perspectives at the instrument. Then, it’s up to viewers to watch, absorb, and find what resonates with them. Pianistic wisdom comes in many varieties, sometimes contradictory!

Ben Laude in interview and Chopin session with Emanuel Ax.

In terms of stage direction, I do my best to steer and structure lessons without leaving my fingerprints all over them. Some artists, like Boris Berman, preferred to work more carefully with me in advance to develop a carefully articulated lesson plan. In other cases, artists were more comfortable speaking extemporaneously about their piece or topic. Garrick Ohlsson, for example, had a marvelous ability to spontaneously manifest highly structured lessons on the spot with very few retakes. One of the trickiest parts of the job has to do with building an ideal viewer in the mind of the artist. Professors are used to the give and take of engaging directly with a student in person, so speaking to an anonymous future student inside a camera can be alienating. If I can manage to make artists comfortable and be themselves, they forget about the artificial environment they’re in and their personalities shine through.

PS: This last year’s Pandemic situation has shown a necessary increase in consulting digital resources in music education. Institutions are now much more open to include such alternatives in their regular curricula. How do you predict the future for Tonebase and similar resources on the Internet?

One of the Scarlatti takes with Claire Huangci.

BL: I should say that I’m familiar enough with dystopian literature and film to be suspicious of the rallying cry to thoroughly digitize education. It has seemed inevitable since the advent of the internet and streaming services, but brick and mortar educational institutions were too thoroughly entrenched in social life to be uprooted like Blockbuster Video. Nevertheless, education had been trending in a digital direction when 2020 arrived. It seems like the pandemic just sped things up by a decade.

Discussing the piano concerto repertoire with John Kimura Parker.

The original mission of tonebase was about connecting amateur pianists to the otherwise insulated worlds of conservatory and concert hall. Therefore it relied on the coexistence, and separation, between offline institutions and online individuals. The amateur’s relative isolation from centers of high level music making and education was the problem we were solving by making the wisdom of great artists accessible and affordable. But what we found even before the pandemic was a widespread general interest in such premium online video content, from more amateurs on the periphery to professionals at the center of these institutions, plus many students and teachers in between. Now that the pandemic has created a situation in which everyone is isolated, including from their own institutions, there has been a need for virtual experiences of all kinds. Some are surrogates that will disappear once social restrictions are lifted, but it seems like others are here to stay. I see lots of potential for tonebase and other online resources to become staples of music education in the post-Covid future, both in institutional settings and private teaching.

You might think a subjective, sensuous discipline like music requires the flexibility of “offline” learning and would find less use in incorporating digital resources into the classroom or studio. Yet what I’ve found in observing tonebase’s appeal is that it’s precisely the elusiveness of music education that increases the value of any given artist’s video lessons. Whereas it might be interesting to hear the same calculus concept explained by five different math instructors, ultimately they’re each trying to communicate the same bit of knowledge. This is never quite the case with piano instructors, as there’s a wonderful lack of consensus about even fundamental principles of technique and interpretation. There are no axiomatic proofs to musical understanding or scientific laws to piano technique, there are only more-or-less-successful approaches developed and passed down through lineages of mentorship. Under the right circumstances, piano teachers should embrace this healthy relativism and utilize our video archive as discussion material during lessons. Having students weigh different approaches will help them think critically about piano playing, find solutions faster, and ultimately foster original artistry to a degree not possible if you only had access to the perspectives of one or two professors.

Screen capture from a digital workshop with Simone Dinnerstein.

On the other hand, often the point of a lesson is not to encourage an exploration of different viewpoints, but to focus on solving a student’s specific problems without the distractions of a second opinion. Even here, a digital resource like tonebase offers a lot of promise down the road. Private teachers often wonder what goes on during the 167 hours between lessons with a student, and having trusted, high quality video lessons and training videos available for the student to watch and practice along with could be a game changer. Teachers could be spending valuable lesson time working on the particular problems a student is facing while they entrust tonebase’s virtual instructors to do the job of introducing or reinforcing concepts and skills in the interim. Along these lines, I believe piano departments and music school libraries will find great value in making tonebase available to both students and faculty as a versatile teaching and training resource.

Garrick Ohlsson preparing for filming momentum.

Of course, in-person learning environments bring benefits that can’t or shouldn’t be reproduced by digital technologies, such as direct feedback from instructors and social interaction with peers. Music, as Boris Berman exclaims in a tonebase lesson, is “the art of sound,” and there’s something irreplaceable about experiencing sonic vibrations in person – making, sharing, and commenting on music together in the same space. Feedback can be digitally mediated to a degree, and tonebase has been increasing its live workshops and developing community feedback channels. But ultimately, the power of digital resources utilized in combination with in-person instruction remains unrealized, especially in music. The goal is to make tonebase a constructive force in reconciling our physical and virtual realities and forging a unified music education that draws from the best of both worlds. (And if all hell breaks loose and the machines do try to take over, I would expect the humanizing forces of music education to tame the robots and for tonebase to help keep our priorities straight!)

After filming session series with Boris Berman.

Emanuel Ax on Learning Chopin in Lockdown

tonebase recently visited the 7-time GRAMMY Award-winning pianist at his breathtaking home in the Berkshires for an extended interview and recording session.

from Piano Street’s Classical Piano News https://www.pianostreet.com/blog/articles/catching-the-moment-11172/

[michaelandy101-blog]

eight Specialists Weigh in on the Previous, Current, and Future Evolution of Hyperlink Constructing

New Post has been published on http://tiptopreview.com/8-experts-weigh-in-on-the-past-present-and-future-evolution-of-link-building/

eight Specialists Weigh in on the Previous, Current, and Future Evolution of Hyperlink Constructing

For over 20 years, SEOs and content material entrepreneurs have constructed hyperlinks throughout the net to get their content material in entrance of their target market.

As Google grows smarter, so do these link-building SEOs – gone are the times of spammy hyperlink schemes and black hat web optimization. Enter fashionable hyperlink builders who’re centered on inserting top quality, related hyperlinks on websites assured to drive an important metrics: conversions and income.

However how far have we actually come, and are there any classes we will take from the previous to tell the place we go from right here? We requested eight hyperlink constructing specialists their ideas on this very query, in addition to what our readers can do to remain forward of the hyperlink constructing curve!

For extra hyperlink constructing suggestions, be sure you try our latest replace to The Newbie’s Information to Hyperlink Constructing:

Learn the Information!

How essential are hyperlinks, actually?

Traditionally, hyperlinks have been a sure-fire method to construct authority and visibility for what you are promoting. Nevertheless, as Google begins to concentrate on different ways equivalent to consumer expertise, will that change how hyperlinks issue into search visibility?

Russ Jones, Search Marketing consultant at Moz, says that the worth of a well-placed hyperlink isn’t going wherever: “Google will find more and more ways to extract value from the link graph and click stream data. The link remains king.”

Britney Muller provides that “If Google disappeared tomorrow, would you still get qualified traffic to your website (via your link profile)? That’s exactly how I believe we should be thinking about link building today.”

Backlinko founder, Brian Dean, has a special perspective:

“I think links will be less important as time goes on,” he says, however agrees that they’re going to at all times be a significant a part of the algorithm. “Links are actually a really good signal! Especially today with Google more focused on E-A-T, links are a great way to size up whether a site is credible or not. Without links, they’d have no real way of knowing if the content on a page is legit.”

Has the definition of a “high quality link” modified?

The brief reply is sure, and (shock!) it depends upon your objectives.

Within the early days, SEOs examined Google with sketchy hyperlink schemes. These low high quality hyperlinks provided a fast repair of hyperlink juice, and a lift in rankings. In the present day, hyperlink builders have ditched the black hat ways in favor of a extra related and consumer-focused strategy, and high quality over amount.

Carrie Rose, CEO at Rise at Seven, has this to say: “The definition of a high-quality link has massively changed over the years. Relevancy is a huge topic online right now — but what does a relevant link actually mean? Ultimately, we track that based on is it a link that is driving traffic to your website, of whom are your audience? Too many link building strategies focus too much on ‘link juice’ and SEO metrics such as DA — but care less about link engagement metrics. SEOs, link builders, and digital PRs should care more about understanding where their audience is, high traffic websites, and gaining links from there instead.”

Russ Jones agrees: “I believe that Google has dramatically increased the degree to which the relevancy of a link matters,” he says, including, “Google has placed greater influence on links that come from topical authorities as they combat issues like fake news and link spam. If this is the case, it means that link builders need to narrow their focus and fight for links from industry peers.”

As relevancy turns into extra essential, our specialists encourage different hyperlink builders to concentrate on the viewers slightly than the outlet.

Tamara Sykes, Public Relations Specialist at Postali, believes that “It’s obviously great to get a backlink in a recognizable outlet like the Wall Street Journal. However, if your audience isn’t there, it only serves half of its purpose. You’ll get a ‘vote’ from a high DA site to prove that yours is more trustworthy, but it may generate little to no traffic because the audience isn’t as invested in what content you have to offer.”

Domenica D’Ottavio, Advertising and marketing Supervisor at Fractl, prefers to diversify her hyperlink portfolios, noting that prime high quality hyperlinks can imply various things in several campaigns.

“The definition of a high-quality link can change depending on your goals,” she says. “Not all links are created equally for every business. In my opinion, the ideal portfolio has a 1) high volume of 2) relevant and 3) high-quality backlinks. If you’re a business in the personal finance space, for example, you might want a mix of links from sites like The Motley Fool, CNN Money, and smaller finance blogs like The Penny Hoarder, Budgets are Sexy, or I Will Teach You To Be Rich.”

Lastly, as with most issues in marketing and web optimization, Andy Crestodina of OrbitMedia reminds us that there are additionally a half dozen different elements to think about together with DA, comply with vs. nofollow, outgoing hyperlinks and far more! So be sure you take these elements into consideration as you develop your hyperlink constructing technique.

Image Source

The function of hyperlink constructing in web optimization is stronger than ever

Growing top quality content material and distributing that content material to revered websites in your goal market could be a particularly scalable and cost-effective method to construct and preserve authority in your area of interest. So, it’s not stunning that hyperlink constructing and digital PR is quickly changing into a core technique for a lot of manufacturers.

Carrie Rose highlights the truth that hyperlink constructing and digital PR industries have grown quickly:

“The responsibility to create good quality content and improve trust to a site no longer purely sits within SEO. Having a good link building strategy which is performing well can improve trust, authority, and therefore rankings for a site. High quality links and high traffic can also increase traffic in the masses… It also has a huge impact on branded search (the holy grail).”

Brian Dean agrees, saying “Content and links have always had significant overlap (after all, people generally link to a page based on the content on that page). But the tie between the two is stronger than ever. That’s because many other tried-and-true link building strategies (like large-scale guest posting) no longer work. Which means your link building efforts largely rely on the content that you’re putting out.”

Surena Chande believes that, general, the standard of hyperlink constructing campaigns has improved since Google’s E-A-T replace: “We’re producing more topic-relevant campaigns for our clients rather than thinking solely about ideas that would land coverage,” she says, including that SEOs and hyperlink builders are actually working collectively to “reevaluate their concepts and ensure they are true to a brand.”

Getting buy-in is simpler — in case you concentrate on the metrics that matter

Due to the additional visibility lately, our specialists agree that it’s simpler than ever to get the buy-in from higher-ups. “I don’t need to tell an executive that a link is like a vote. They know that now,” says Russ Jones. “I don’t have to say ‘80% of purchases online begin with a search’. They know that now, too.”

“Link building has a way of showing direct results for executives and stakeholders and therefore becomes easier to get the buy-in,” Carrie Rose says. “Traditional PR, creative, or offline marketing strategies are receiving less and less budget and attention because of its inability to prove ROI and we see that budget reallocated to link building and digital PR efforts.”

Andy Crestodina agrees: “Just show an executive the Moz Link Explorer ‘Compare Link Profiles’ report and they’ll get excited …or upset. Once a stakeholder sees the data, they usually want to take action. The key is to guide the ideas away from the spammy actions and toward high-quality content marketing and influencer outreach.”

With much less inner training and campaigning on the government stage, entrepreneurs are actually confronted with more durable questions round how their particular methods influence ROI. To take action, our specialists suggest maintaining issues easy and taking it sluggish.

“It’s important to explain that Domain Authority moves very slowly. It takes patience,” Andy says, including, “it’s a proxy metric for PageRank. It’s not Google. Focus on the actions, not the reports.”

When you want some assist breaking down metrics, try Andy’s Whiteboard Friday:

Russ Jones breaks issues down even additional: “Report simple campaign statistics such as: ‘referring domains and referring traffic are increasing’. Coupled with a generic metric like DA or PA, this gives stakeholders the most important answers about the quality of the link building campaign. Second, we report the increased traffic and rankings relative to competitors based on the work. It is important, though, to provide context wherever possible. If a competitor has been out-spending you and acquiring more links because of it, we shouldn’t let that go unreported.”

Tamara Sykes finds that it’s useful to supply some background on websites that hyperlink to her content material. “I go as far as to share what that website’s purpose is, who its audience is and the website’s SEO stats,” she says. “This helps me paint a picture of why this link is relevant to a brand, rather than sharing a number that only shows ‘Hey, we got 12 backlinks’.”

The place ought to hyperlink builders focus?

Google is getting higher and higher at recognizing top quality, related hyperlinks. “They’re super good at identifying links that don’t fit with a natural pattern. And it’s not just obvious black hat spam,” Brian Dean says. “Google can also filter out many grey hat approaches (like mass guest posting), which basically only leaves a handful of link building approaches: digital PR, targeted outreach, and content designed to get links.”

So in relation to hyperlink constructing technique, the place ought to hyperlink builders and digital PRs focus their efforts?

Get artistic

Take a look at out new content material mediums to face out from the pack!

Carrie Rose notes that, though we’re seeing extra automation in marketing, “Robots can’t manufacture creativity. That’s where the best links come from — where content is more creative than their competitors and brands are getting links others can’t replicate.”

Andy Crestodina recommends creating new instruments and authentic analysis that options bite-size, shareable nuggets equivalent to stats, graphs, and infographics. “These are 100-times more link-worthy than anything else on your domain,” he says.

Construct relationships

Because the market turns into extra saturated, it will likely be particularly essential for hyperlink builders and digital PRs to deepen relationships with revered publishers and authors of their trade. However you don’t have to overthink it.

Andy believes that slightly personalization goes a great distance: “Link building has a bad reputation for a good reason: spam. Spammers send cold emails to website owners, clogging our inboxes with the same messages.”

However how do you construct these connections within the first place?

Heat up the dialog by partaking with that creator or editor on social media! Domenica D’Ottavia makes use of Twitter to attach. “Twitter is an excellent tool for building those relationships with journalists,” she says. “Attain out to them, like their stuff, reply and retweet, present them you are an actual particular person… Once you lastly outreach them along with your hyperlink constructing undertaking, they will acknowledge your identify out of your interactions on Twitter and might be more likely to reply positively to your PR pitch.”

Others agree that the ROI of mass outreach continues to say no, remembering the times of in-person hyperlink constructing. “Believe it or not, I used to CALL people, introduce myself, explain how interesting I thought their ‘X’ business was,” says Britney Muller. “I’d ask some questions and then weave in a thoughtful proposition of us linking to each other’s websites.”

“People are becoming numb to any non-targeted outreach,” Brian Dean provides. “If you are good at personalization, there could still be a chance of securing links but the bar of what qualifies as ‘personalized’ is higher than ever. Now you almost need to mention their dog’s name to get a response.” (Observe to all of the hyperlink builders on the market: my canine’s identify is Ginger.)

Study extra about nice outreach from Britney’s Whiteboard Friday on the topic! 

Faucet into influencer networks

Influencer marketing is a rising area and, no, it isn’t only for shopper manufacturers and Instagram. Leveraging specialists to raise your content material can seize the eye of your goal publishers and viewers.

Surena Chande says that “utilizing expert commentary is one of the strongest and most overlooked techniques in link building. If you have clients who are experts in their field or have access to the CEO, you can utilize them to build links with minimal effort for both you and your client.”

“Link building is influencer marketing,” says Andy Crestodina. “You’re pitching an influencer (usually blogger or editor) with a request, usually some kind of collaboration. When you combine influencer marketing with original research, you have the ingredients in place. Your content supports their content. Links begin to appear spontaneously. You’re attracting them. Do it right and high DA sites will link to you every few days. Magic.”

Image Source

Capitalize on trending matters

In a information cycle that’s consistently altering, sizzling matters can rise and fall within the blink of a watch. However when you’ve got your timing proper, you may trip the pattern wave to safe additional eyeballs from editors and readers.

“I believe that the pandemic, particularly the early stages in 2020, taught the industry a very harsh lesson in the form of reactive outreach and campaigns forming one of the best methods of outreach,” Surena Chande says. “I was so used to conceiving campaign ideas for large-scale interactive pieces, and the unpredictability of the situation taught us that we had to quickly change our approach to link building.”

“Jumping on a trending topic and creating a project or link building campaign around something that’s already earned the attention of journalists” says Domenica D’Ottavio, however notes to proceed with warning. “While newsjacking is a clever way to earn a ton of links very fast, it’s also pretty risky. You have to work around the clock to get your idea created before the topic has lost relevance, and it might flop if you’re too late to respond, wasting your investment.”

Our specialists additionally advise to remain on prime of the information throughout the net, learn articles from quite a lot of publications weekly, examine what journalists are asking for once they put out #journorequests, and analyze what angles they tackle matters as they go viral. This may guarantee that you’re effectively positioned when it comes time to pitch your content material.

Conclusion

On the finish of the day, hyperlink constructing has undergone some main modifications within the final 15 years (doubtless for the higher!), however what’s previous is new, and most of the identical guidelines proceed to use:

Related content material will at all times carry out as long as you goal the correct viewers

Hyperlinks stay a significant a part of how Google decided the experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness of a website.

Creativity and timeliness in hyperlink constructing might be rewarded

Huge thanks to our knowledgeable contributors:

Andy Crestodina

Britney Muller

Brian Dean

Carrie Rose

Domenica D’Ottavio

Russ Jones

Surena Chande

Tamara Sykes

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[foreignquarry]

VOICE OVERS

DISCLAIMER:

unfortunately, due to storage limitations and glitches with my computer during the editing process, I lost a lot of the drafts and practice cuts that featured some experimentation. I’ll try to instead describe the different things I tried.

-- voice over --

third person narration -----

the sections of the film that involve third person narrative prose describing scenes at odds with what the viewer sees. initially, i used my own voice for this, in a sort of rough cut just to help with pacing. using this rough cut made me think that using my voice was not the right way forward, just because i wasnt personally happy with the performance i managed.

last year, i did a lot of experimentation with my voice and vocal performance. i developed different techniques to explore the unhuman aspects of communication, especially through a lens of technology. i used a piece of software called Lyrebird to generate a synthetic vocal avatar - an artificial intelligence trained to mimic my own voice. at the time, i used this to distance my physical self and parody my inability to express myself.

SADLY, this software was bought out by some company and is no longer accessible as it was, and no longer for free. it’s hidden behind the facade of this other, new software that im not familiar with and dont care to learn. there are other methods of vocal avatar generation that i may investigate, but this ruled out this option at this stage.

instead, i tried to use some generic text-to-speech programs to generate synthetic voices. i hoped that this would help add to the eeriness of the film, and the feeling of it being abandoned and devoid of humanity. i used a white-sounding male-sounding British-accented posh-sounding voice, to parody this sort of David Attenborough nature/museum documentary. of course, this sort of voice being a voice of God in film, through tradition, speaks to bigotries and patriarchal authoritarianism. like, we need white men to tell us what the things we are seeing are. this was something i was back-of-the-mind-conscious of at the time, but hadn’t fully questioned it. although it’s maybe a conceptually sound idea, it didn’t at all sound good, or right. with this automated voice in particular, the film was lacking a human quality, i felt. there are no humans visually present in the film, and there is a stark absence of humanity in the way the stories are reanimated from the stone. my human arm has been digitally removed, and the traces are all that remain.

--

the next thing i tried was a more intentional and intimate style of performance, modelled after the recent trend of ASMR videos.

Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR), sometimes auto sensory meridian response,[2][3][4] is a tingling sensation that typically begins on the scalp and moves down the back of the neck and upper spine. A pleasant form of paresthesia,[5] it has been compared with auditory-tactile synesthesia[6][7] and may overlap with frisson.

ASMR signifies the subjective experience of "low-grade euphoria" characterized by "a combination of positive feelings and a distinct static-like tingling sensation on the skin". It is most commonly triggered by specific auditory or visual stimuli, and less commonly by intentional attention control.[1][8] A genre of videos which intend to stimulate ASMR has emerged, of which over 13 million are published on YouTube.[9]

I’m interested in this form of vocal performance in the way it attempts to target and illicit a specific physical reaction. Ed Atkins has spoken about the way technology develops, seeks to conquer various physical senses, ie, IMAX cameras making screens too large for one person’s eyesight, or sound systems rattling bones. ASMR attempts to create euphoric physical feelings, comparable to orgasm. as such, there is a sort of unspoken sexual quality to a lot of these videos and to a lot of these vocal stylings. often, and indeed usually, the speakers or performers in these videos are attractive women. 

in this episode of the podcast Reasonably Sound, Mike Rugnetta makes the comparison between this sort of work, and the sexist history of the female voice assistant, in early telecoms and switchboard operators, up to the present, female Siri or Google Home. there are, maybe unsuitable or offensive, connections to be made between this sort of outsourced female labour, the sexual qualities of ASMR, and sex work. but, i dont think it’s really my place to touch on it. there’s just some interesting dynamics around service and power in this form.

the episode can be found here: 

http://reasonablysound.com/2014/10/02/whisper-quiet/

anyway, technically, this phenomena doesn’t really exist, scientifically. it does exist in the minds of people who watch this stuff. so, there’s a fun pseudo-science sort of thing here, that compels me too. like a sort of witchcraft to do with audio frequencies.

in this vocal performance, then, i tried to allow my voice to take on these ASMR qualities. i whispered the words into my microphone from a very close distance, to encourage uncomfortable mouth sounds, saliva pops, and microphone peaks. these sounds are ASMR triggers, but also betray the audio recording in a few ways. it’s uncomfortable for the viewer to hear mouth and body sounds so loudly. it reveals the work as an unprofessional one, working with what would be considered to be bad recording practices. it also brings qualities of a human body, and particularly gross qualities at that, to the film, lending it a subjective human presence.

--

i feel mixed about how this has worked overall. i think it totally creates the correct responses in a viewer, but there’s no denying that in being the Voice of God for this film, i am painting myself to be the God of this world. my narration, although at odds with what the viewer sees, speaks to my authorial power, and im not sure this is a power i want to be spoken about!! as a middle class, white man, i think i need to question more thoroughly what it means for me to give myself authority in this context...

this was something Dave Beech mentioned in our crits with him, recently.

this is all in my head as i continue to experiment with the narration and voice over in this film. i dont anticipate i will have brought this any further by the end of the project, but that’s ok. here is a video showing the current way my voice is sounding in this passages:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzgbVBFhvRc

first person stories ---

now, this is also complicated.

at the beginning of the project it felt very important to me that the stories would only appear visually, as text, and not as audio. in the writing i have gone to lengths to recreate, phonetically and visually, regional accents and period grammar. understanding my limited ability as a voice performer, i felt it would be gross and inappropriate for me to perform these texts myself. that it would be sort of equivalent to cultural appropriation, especially as im not actually from the South West (unless u go some ways back down the tree).

however, this being said, i ended up opting for a sort of version of a performance. i experimented with different styles of delivery, attempting accents and different styles of voice. i also experimented with isolating select frequencies. the OM frequency of the tuning fork is the one i chose to isolate, producing a distant-sounding voice that is hard to identify as mine:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hQDgEWFRIM&t=41s

for a necessarily female voice, however, this proved to be tricky. immediately in the crit, it seemed people could identify the recording as a poor attempt at an impression on my part, even though i thought i had done quite well with my shakespearean old woman impression. i ended up taking this audio and distorting it even further. the vocal inflections and sentence patterns are still identifiable, and when watching the text it is easy to follow along with the sound, but it is so distorted and modified i dont feel it can be traced back to me anymore. the femininity and the quality of the accent and the age of the caracter are all identifiable as well, i feel. over the course of this video the clip becomes more distorted, as if the stone tape is losing its fidelity on playback:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2A6jY-C1UA

i find this absolutely successful, especially on the speakers with which i listen to it. although as i continue working i might go back on this idea.

[sylleboi]

𝕴𝖈𝖔𝖓𝖘 𝖜𝖔𝖗𝖐𝖘𝖍𝖔𝖕𝖘

For this workshop, we focused on creating artwork to fit the following aims & objectives:

To create iconic portraiture using simple mark-making techniques and some traditional mediums

To develop portraiture using an integrated process of both traditional and digital approaches

To make connections to research as we begin our final project

To accomplish this, we were told to pick an iconic artist from history at random,  using cards showing a variety of these famous artists from a card game. My first card was René Magritte. Funnily enough, we studied his work in our first brief, (Pick & Mix) where we looked at the surrealism movement which began around the beginning of the 1920s. 

The second card that I picked was of Banksy, well known for not being known. I liked the idea of doing him as a portrait for the reason being that no one knows who he is, meaning no one knows what he looks like, but I was advised to go with René first for this task, and then possibly go back and do Banksy afterward if I wanted to.

Before starting, we had a short introduction to how we are going to be using the different mediums for this workshop, including the following techniques/mediums; paper carbon transfer, traditional tracing, ink washes, and mono-printing;

Icon 01: René Magritte

Who were they? What were they well known for doing/what made them iconic and why did they create the work that they did? What made them go down the road of the surrealistic movement?

So, to the task at hand–

This is the reference that I chose to go with for René (which I printed out in A4 scale):

There were a good handful of portraits to chose from of him, most of them being from his older days, but I chose this picture of him for a few different reasons. One of them being that I find myself to be able to relate to it better than any of the other pictures, due to the fact that he is of a younger age in this portrait. On top of that, I find that it has a calming sort of atmosphere to it, which I found quite appealing when I first saw it as it stood out from most other portraits that I came across.

Tracing paper

The first medium I decided to have a go at was pen on tracing paper since I am familiar with it already. I didn’t want to jump into anything too far out from my comfort zone as the first thing I were to draw this day and at the same time, I wanted to ensure that I had a “layer”/drawing of the reference that was of some detail so that if I wanted to, I could go crazy with any of the other mediums since I would still always have the main silhouette to refer back to, making it readable no matter what.

Here it is shown side by side:

Carbon transfer paper

The next medium I decided to go for was the carbon transfer paper. Now, I have never used this myself prior to this workshop, although I have heard quite a lot about it in the past, primarily from online sources (other artists or companies selling this type of product). I used a pencil to transfer the carbon pigment in an attempt to replicate the texture and look of the traditional pencil stroke, which is one of my personal favorites texture-wise.

Mono-printing

The final medium that I experimented with for this first lesson was mono-printing. Like the carbon transfer paper, I too haven’t tried this prior to this lesson. 

Icon 02: Banksy

[gigsoupmusic]

Behind the Artist: An Interview with Chantmagick

Chantmagick, aka Marilyn McNeal, is an independent creative who combines her love of music, film, nature, dance, and Earth into a unique presentation of art for her followers. It's hard to pinpoint only one aspect of her music as the result of her success as it is all intertwined to represent the power of Chantmagick in a soft, subtle way. Read below to dive deeper into this lo-fi indie-folk artist and you'll see what we mean. What inspired the name Chantmagick? What does it mean? When I think of chanting, the first thing that comes to mind is a group of monks cloaked and singing in a circle in some dark abbey during the Middle Ages. Somehow this imagery appeals to me, actually. I'm drawn to the sense of collective physical and spiritual pursuit of something higher than this image calls to mind. The other side of it is that I like the sense that chanting is a simple, very physical intuitive and direct activity. Chanting means allowing your feelings and personal energy to pump through your body and out into the world in the form of energetic, fluid lines of melody.  As for the word "magick," I added the "k" to evoke a Middle Earth fantasy era of witches, warlocks, dragons, hobbits, etc. I remember growing up with Dune, The Hobbit, Star Wars, and being enthralled with the fantasy world these movies provided. Moving beyond our ho-hum day-to-day practical world and into a magical space where we can be our best selves is something I wanted to evoke in the project name. Your platform seems to be more than just about making music.... describe to us in your own words what your art/music stands for. I'm really interested in exploring universal questions around "who are we" as a species. What is our potential? How do we access our potential and how can we cultivate it for personal, community, and planetary good. Music, movement, and video are the means of expression I have at hand to ask these questions. How does your music help people? Reading the comments on my YouTube channel when I post a video has really been heartening and instructive. I'll let my fans speak for themselves: "You sound like the earth. mysterious, vast, magical and wild. thanks for the music." "You are the breath of fresh air and positivity we all need" "Your music is very unique and gives me always a positive feeling" "Your contribution is tremendous, hopeful, serene and leads us to a centered state of joy" “This is therapy for the inner being.” "Thank you for sharing your songs, Your music is so peaceful and uplifting it truly is a Spirit thing." "I feel lighter within seconds. Thank you for what you do by being genuinely you." What ideas are implemented throughout your work? Through dance and music, I show myself in a state of becoming a more connected and sensitive human being. Through my song and dance, I want to elevate the present moment as an authentic source of information. I sing about and show intuitive, non-intellectual movement in nature, the fluidity of time and space, rejection of fear as a source of information, embracing growth, simplicity, and kindness.

What ideas do you hope to inspire in others? I think the main idea behind showing myself in the midst of my growth process is to encourage others to identify, explore, and embrace their own growth process. What is getting in the way of them fulfilling their potential? What would unfettered growth look and feel like? What would one be moving towards? I am hard-wired to see the glass half full and not half empty. I want everyone who experiences my work to come away with an optimistic perspective. Tell us more about the connection between Earth and nature into your creations. How is that translated through music and film? I began creating work from within the Chantmagick project in March 2017. Initially, I used high-quality photos and video clips from Pixabay and paired this with my own music. The music at that time was layers of vocal chanting (meaning no lyrics just melodic vocalization) over mellow, hypnotic an electronic keyboards.  After 60 videos using Pixabay's visual material, I realized that I literally had to put more skin in the game, meaning that I had to move in front of the camera. It was scary, but I felt that by showing myself dancing in the woods of Northern California, I would give additional context to the work allowing me to move the connection to nature piece closer to the center of what I was making. Like everyone else, I'm working on being the best person I can be. Keeping ego in check, being aware and attuned to people around me, showing up for my family, showing up for my students, showing up in my relationship, just showing up in general. It's not easy.  I've lived in my head for decades and I finally emerged about 5 years ago! I really want to be here, in this moment. When I am present, or as I move closer and closer to being present most of the time, I find myself stretching, dancing around and singing ditties, melodies, silly songs. Maybe, it's just nervous energy because being present is so unfamiliar and uncomfortable. I don't know.  But, I figured out that taking my jitterbugging self out of the house and into nature was a good idea! Pulling up into the parking lot of a local park, filling water bottles, moving down the path smelling trees . . . all of it just calms me down and makes that coming to the center, being quiet and being present possible. So it all just worked out. I decided to just let loose outside and have my partner video me losing my mind out of doors. It never occurred to me to lip-sync to my own songs in shopping malls and in cars or in bars. The visual component is a continuation of the music and the music is a continuation of the visual side. Take us through your songwriting process...When writing a song, what typically inspires your lyrics and melodies? Oh, thank you! This is such a good question.  Initially, I began by creating an atmospheric layer of sound in Ableton Live, my recording software and then chanting over this layer multiple times in order to create lush vocal harmony. I've been learning how to record in Ableton Live over the past 10 years, diving into tutorials on the Sampler, Simpler, and Operator as the means to design sounds for music. Typically, I'll get into it for a month or two and then burn out and focus on messing around with what I've picked up. I thought it would be interesting to contrast sounds that I'd made in Ableton that were obviously synthetic with earthy, raw primitive chanting. Chanting also appealed to me because it feels so primal. You can't really rehearse chanting. You feel it and you do it. I worked in one or two continuous flows. I would dig around, throw together sounds and then stop the second I found something that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up! Same with chanting. I rooted around in my spirit, guts, psyche, and body and made a vocal sound that felt like it belonged with the electronic keyboard layer. Once I recorded this, I harmonized to the vocal layer. Sometimes I would create several layers of harmony. I recorded 60 chants like this from March 2017 - September 2017, so for about 6 months. One of my favorites from this time is "A Chant for Whales" (See below). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_SMB7fRZ2U Then, I just moved on. I started singing with lyrics and recording songs with the acoustic guitar. I felt like I was done with the ambient chants and wanted to move on to something that had been brewing in me for a long time . . . bringing together indie-folk influences like Yo La Tengo and Modest Mouse with the raw unvarnished power of American roots singers like The Carter Family and many of the performers on Alan Lomax's Southern Journey series. I tune the guitar to whatever sounds good to me and then play brief repetitive phrases that I sing over. I've tried traditional Western songwriting and find that it doesn't cover the in-between tones, feelings, and thoughts I want to express! I don't have any solid guitar technique so I rely on custom string tunings and very primitive clusters of sound to express song ideas. I often play my own instruments that I make out of cardboard boxes, wire, sticks, and tin cans. All this time, I'd been using my neighbor's Rode NT-1A for my guitar and vocals and used a Presonus AudioBox interface I bought in 2005. Good gear is nice but my whole approach to music is making use of what you have. This goes for time, space, gear, and inspiration. My main thing is to keep my mind clear of distraction and anxiety so that when I have an idea, I can get to my setup and lay something down immediately. I try to nail everything in one or two takes. I'm going for authentic versus pro sounding. My feeling is that it's more important to get and stay in the groove of expressing myself authentically than laboring for hours over the perfect reverb for a kick drum.  My wager is that over time, I will slowly improve. This has been true so far. My editing has improved over time but still has a long way to go! I upgraded to an Audient ID14 interface and an AKG C214 at the beginning of last year. I also have a monthly subscription to Slate Digital's mixing and mastering tools. It's been nice to hear the difference. Your YouTube platform is a huge focus of your art. How do you manage to be both the filmmaker and musician? Curiosity. And the fierce desire to put my work in front of more and more people. From 2010 to 2016, I uploaded all of my songs to SoundCloud. I stopped uploading there because there was no community vibe. When I created my Chantmagick YouTube channel in 2017, I knew I would have to create videos for the songs I posted. This was and is exciting. Being consumed with the desire to make and share work has really propelled me to be open to learning new things. I got a smartphone, learned how to shoot cinematic videos, learned video editing to music, and haven't looked back. Now I teach others how to do the same through a class I teach at UC Berkeley.  The other thing is that tools and platforms for distribution keep changing, growing, morphing into the next thing. I look at everything and ask myself "Will this serve my mission of making great work and sharing it as widely as I can?" If the answer is yes, I learn it. If the answer is no, I keep moving. I just started re-editing my work into 15 - 20 second nuggets for TikTok. I am so excited to have a new platform to work with. I am working on an article for Medium as we speak about my experiences with TikTok so far and why I think it's a godsend for ambitious creatives.  Which do you feel expresses your work better - film or music? Why? Oooh. That's a good one. Video and music have really fused into one entity now so it's hard to separate them. When I think about it, I share my YouTube link more than my Spotify link. A - because I think building a community on YouTube is much more doable, fun, and rewarding than dealing with Spotify and B - because I feel like Spotify doesn't respect musicians. That being said, I am finding myself putting my time into video platforms over just audio platforms because pairing my music with moving images is perfect. I'm so into it, I don't know how much the songs stand up without videos. So videos with music vs just videos and just music. Do you have a favorite song? Which one? Why? "Find Someone You Love" is from Fall 2018. I entered a magical zone and wrote and recorded seven songs in the space of a month. I had my friend Rupert Clerveaux mix and master them and put them up on Spotify and Bandcamp. Somehow I channel the perfect creamy dark acoustic guitar sound that I'd been dreaming of for ages. What kind of legacy do you hope to leave behind with your work? I want to show people that they can express themselves honestly using whatever tools they have at hand. Then they can share their work as an offering to people everywhere who might benefit from it. I'm pretty bored by identity politics, but I have to say that I delight in sharing sounds and moving images of myself as a black woman dancing and connecting to nature to the folk soundtracks I create. It's so much fun and everyone always is blissed out when they see the work. It feels good. Read the full article

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Source:https://www.quora.com/How-does-the-recruitment-outsourcing-process-take-place/answer/Yogita-Yadav-57

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