Anberlin Drawing

Before I move on to another famous synesthete, I decided to post another drawing. This one is of what is probably my favorite song in the world. 'Paperthin Hymn' by Anberlin.

This song means so much to me lyric wise and the colors I see when I listen to it. I love the combination of the purple, blues and black and the design they make.

The heavy guitars make the solid lines and hard edges. Surprisingly there isn't any red in this song since that's usually what I see when I hear guitars. My theory is that I also hear colors based on the key the song is in and sometimes it overpowers the colors of the instruments. This would be why the guitars have more blue in them than red.

There are softer parts of the song, which is why there are some curves in the design.

The lead vocalist, Stephen Christian, has an amazing and rich purple voice. I could not do the color justice no matter how hard I tried. This guy's voice is one of my favorites to listen/see.

The black can be attributed to the percussion, most basic drums are black to me. They are are sometimes overpowered by the rest of the song, but that is not the case here.

Overall, I love this drawing and the song it comes from.

So I finally got around to scanning in some of my drawings and here is the first.
This my representation of what I hear when I listen to the song 'Handlebars' by the Flobots. If you haven't heard the song yet you can listen to it here.

There is a specific process that I go through to create these drawings.

• The first thing I do is pull out the patterns I hear and sketch them out. When I do this I have to listen to the song over and over again and pick out each individual element. This step usually takes around 20 minutes. 
• Since my sound-color synesthesia is musical sounds, each specific voice and instrument will have a certain pattern or color, so to recreate what I see means I have to pull the image in my head apart, then put it back to together on paper.  
• The next step is deciding what colors to use. I do this on a separate sheet of paper since I have to experiment to recreate the colors I want. Many times I also have to mix the colors to create the shade that is closest to the colors I want. 
• In my drawing of  'Handelbars' the only colors I didn't mix were the black and the jade green line. 
• After I know the pattern I want to use and the colors, I have to decide where each color goes. Again it is like putting together a puzzle. 
• Most of the time I do have an idea of what colors I am going to use and where they will go but it's never certain until I start coloring them in.
• Once everything is decided on I color in the patterns. I usually listen to the song throughout this entire process. 

Since my synesthetic perceptions are very general the drawings tend to be a little more elaborate then what I actually hear. But I'm also trying to show all of the elements that are combined into what I hear/see. 

All my drawings are done with colored pencils and I'll put a couple more up soon.