For this project, I really wanted to do a Mitski song. I wanted to revolve my art piece around her music because, once I started to get serious about art in high school I would listen to Mitski while I was practicing. I started off this project by making a list of my favorite songs by Mitski and crossing off any songs that had music videos. The song I chose to revolve the project is “I don't smoke” This song is about being in an addictive and toxic relationship.
After choosing my song I wrote down a few things I could draw related to the song and it’s lyrics. The first idea I brainstormed was painting someone pouring tea in a cup on a table with an filled ash tray next to it. My second idea was to paint someone chiseling into a marble statue that is smiling, I made this idea in reference to the meaning of the song and to the lyrics “So if you need to be mean, be mean to me I can take it and put it inside of me If your hands need to break more than trinkets in your room You can lean on my arm as you break my heart”. After this I felt I was making things too complicated and wasn’t focusing enough on “trying to represent color as emotion” part of the project. I started over by listing the positive and negative representation of the colors I wanted to use blue, red, green, and purple. For the image I decided I was going to go either paint someone who looked sad while there was smoke around them or someone who was upset while they were smoking.


In the project I was hoping to either show discontent or disappointment with color, I mostly wanted for when others saw the painting they didn’t think I was trying to paint someone who was depressed. I wanted for people to think “oh this is regret, or disappointment”. At first, I was really unsure how to represent these emotions and the song with color, so I tried to experiment with color pencils and procreate with my reference images to get better idea of what colors to use. I started off with red because I thought it would look nicer when I used acrylic paint along with the green background. But I ended up making the same mistake listed in the unit 8 video of it just looking like Christmas colors. To get better idea of how to use color for my painting I went and looked up live concerts of mitkis’s song and an interview of her answering questions about her music, too see what she felt when performing and writing this songs compared to the ideas I had down about what the song meant to me. This is how I ended up choosing just the color blue as the base color of my image. learning how this song is supposed to be of a person going through a toxic relationship and picking up bad habits, I thought it would be a good idea to draw someone smoking painted in blue to show the sadness of the situation (Hyland). I choose yellow for the color of the smoke because I remembered how in the unit 8 video, yellow can mean danger and some toxic signs are yellow or a mix of yellow, green, and red. I chose red for the tears and the bruises on the face because I believed it would make the painting more dramatic. The color green was chosen simply because it was cool color like the color blue.