The song I chose for this assignment was Linkin Park’s One step closer. Released on August 29, 2000, this was their first single from their debut track, Hybrid Theory. Linkin Park is known for their angst genre, and their main singer, Chester Bennington’s  powerful, scream/singing voice. The electric guitar starts going into an up and down pattern, followed by the drums. The song build momentum, followed by an aggressive way of expressing frustration. The transition from the guitar is almost loop-like, bringing us back into the up and down pattern, and intensifying as Bennington’s voice increases in volume. Bennington also started that he wrote the lyrics of this song to express the anger he felt growing up, admiring he didn’t fit in well and got into physical fights. The song constantly repeats the words “I’m about to break” and expressing how suffocated he felt as well. 


Discover: To start, I was already picturing a pattern of harsh lines, or waves to mimic the volume lines increasing. I wanted to capture the emotions this song projects into its listeners. After a few tries with lighting, broken glass, swirls. I decides to gradually move into simple lines with a bit of geometric shapes to brainstorm on what would the final product look like. 
Define: On the first 12 boxes, I wanted to incorporate the lyrics at first. I created Simple patters of loops, and broken glass patters based on what the song constantly repeating the phrase “I’m about to break”. I went with the patterns of swirls loopy lines describing the repetition of the guitar notes and phrases. 

Develop: When I started drawing my final 6 boxes, I started to consider other few elements of this song. I researched the album cover of the album Hybrid Theory. A spray painted image of a war soldier can be seen holding a flag, behind what looks like dragonfly wings. I decided to change some of my patterns after this, and decided to incorporate the design of the dragonfly wings, trying to add a contrast of black and white. I still kept some of the swirls, and decided to try to add more complex designs. After all, the emotions of this songs, while are more on the negative side, are all over the pace, which allowed me to add sharp edges and an explosion outline pattern. 

Deliver: To conclude, this project required a lot of brainstorming. Practice and lots of trial and error. Visualizing a song is not easy at all, and I struggled to come up with the best way to portray this song as accurate as possible. I used some inspiration from the links provided. I wanted to challenge myself into creating different and complicated patterns. It is definitely a process to come up with what to draw, how to fit it best onto the song and experiment with different styles of patterns and geometrical shapes. Overall, this project was able to guide me into trying something different, and learn to work with abstract art, which is something I still have to work on.