Digital Image Editing (WK2) - Designing Emotion

For this project, we were told to visually show the emotion we feel when listening to a song of our choice. This was actually so much more difficult than I thought it would be. I had a really hard time choosing a song, because music itself has always been very emotional for me. As soon as this project was assigned, I had about 10 songs immediately pop into my head from various genres that evoked different emotions or memories. 

I've made a few posts about the rave community, so I sat down and really thought about what songs played at those events could instantly shift my mood. In the end, I decided on "Feel Something" by Illenium, Excision, and I Prevail. Explaining how this song makes me feel is so hard. It conveys a feeling of hopelessness, but also somehow inspires me. It gives me a feeling of transformation or transcending, like things may not be perfect right now, but it won't always be like this. 

These are the pictures I used to create my final image:

I used a lot of different techniques that I'm still trying to master with this project, like the harmonize tool and some different masks. I tried to isolate different elements in order to get the fire colors somewhat similar, but I had some difficulty once I harmonized the different layers. Overall, I had the most difficulty with deciding what I wanted to do and then finding images that worked well together to convey that idea. This wasn't even close to the original idea I started out with. I had three different projects open and really wanted to see which one came together. In the end, I think the end result is exactly what I was looking for.