Welcome to the last diary entry of the year! Last month I talked about changing course and focusing more on non-character music for a while. Writing for locations, societies, objects, and concepts is turning out to be harder than I thought but progress is being made, though such is my luck that right now it is when I happen to have the most ideas for characters. In any case, this month The North sees the addition of the leitmotif of the Wall, which is itself a combination of motifs from the Children, the Others, and the Starks all packaged into an ever ascending series of chord progressions that seems to go on and on forever.
Picking up where I left it
While I was getting ready to launch this website a year ago, I had originally intended to populate the website with art from many artists whose illustrations I have come to love. I approached some of them asking for permission to upload their art to this website but the answer was more often than not “I’m sorry but no“. Most often it came down to them not holding the rights of the illustrations they made, as they were commissioned by a third party who owned the rights to the illustrations, so even if they had wanted to let me use their illustrations it wasn’t possible. In the end I found myself with very limited options and a series of mismatched illustrations that didn’t have the tone I was looking for, so I decided to scrap the idea altogether; after all, this website was about the music of A Song of Ice and Fire and not about illustrations. And now, almost a year later, it has become quite apparent to me while that I need to pick up the idea of beautifying the website in some way.
A bit of backstory. In my teenage years I attended art school for two years and when I am the mood I still doodle a bit with some pencil or charcoal (which nowadays happens once or twice a year at most). So, in the process of trying to convince myself to pick up drawing again I decided to look around in my box-of-old-stuff-that-should-be-thrown-away-but-I-won’t-just-yet and found a couple of drawings from said period. They are nothing to call home about but at the time I felt quite accomplished that I managed to learn the basic principles of drawing.
While I was working on the Wall leitmotif I kept picturing the ice glistening under the sun and I kept thinking about how much I wanted that image on the website. Looking at my old drawings I think that with enough effort I should be able to create some art for this website that would make it come alive, even at the expense of having less time to write music. However, if having less time to write music and needing to dust off my drawing skills wasn’t bad enough I also feel the need to update myself and learn how to paint digitally with a graphic tablet. In the end it makes sense to go digital since it is much more versatile than traditional painting and I must admit after so many years without painting I feel as uncomfortable holding a brush as I do holding a digital pen, so why not just skip the brush altogether. I hope to get my hands on a new graphic tablet soon and start uploading some illustrations to the website some time next year. See you then!
Music of Ice and Fire 