Overwhelmed, a Good Thing: A Junior Experimental Project by Peter Salcido (2013)

For my piece I explored the feeling of being overwhelmed when you hear your favorite song. So it’s more of a happy feeling rather than sad or stressed. What I mean by overwhelmed is like the goose bumps or chills and excitement you feel when you hear your favorite song. Also how you are uplifted and feel that everything is alright. So what I did to represent that is I added a dark gradient which has different colors in the gradient to represent the different struggles someone may face. The swirlies represent the fading away of the dark emotions, along with the low opacity. The candle in the background shows the light leading the darkness since candles usually light the way. In this case its a literal thing. I also added a moon in the upper left corner because, like the candle, the moon also lights the way out of darkness. I added the music notes to represent the music and some inspirational lyrics from some of favorite songs.

What I did to get the gradient is I used the gradient tool and I added different colors to the gradient. After I did that I used the swirl tool to swirl the gradient to see behind the gradient. After, I used the type on a line tool to add the lyrics of three different songs. Then I found a photo of a candle and I used that photo to put behind the gradient. Then I added a hole in the middle to show the candle light. After, I added the moon with some music notes.