'Music is Roots' - Dan Kozerski

This piece of design was created by myself, Dan Kozerski, over the past few weeks, to be presented on March 1^st, 2012. Music is Roots is the title of the piece and its components for creation were pencil drawing, and digital illustration. Follow me as I walk you through the creation process.

When I went through the initial stages of planning and questioning that we did in class, I realized that while I do have strong ties to my family, my ethnicity and the history of my family name doesn’t quite define me, as person, in my everyday life. I wanted to be one hundred percent honest in what really makes me who I am, so I decided to base my project around music – more specifically hip-hop music. I write, record, perform, and promote my own hip-hop music, and it’s truly my biggest passion. I spend hours everyday thinking about it/working on it. It was the obvious direction.

My creation process began with me searching for inspiration on tumblr. I follow some very cool designers and it’s often a great place to find inspiration. That being said, I came across some designs images that incorporated roots and I thought that would be an awesome way to incorporate music with myself. For the beginning I really had this idea of symmetry in mind, and that’s how my idea began to develop.

            From there I began doing some simple sketches. I thought of how iconic a head can be, so I began drawing roots coming straight from a faceless individual. I planned on making the head look like the artists that have musically influenced me the most, which are Kanye West and Lupe Fiasco - more specifically Kanye’s album The College Dropout and Lupe’s album Lupe Fiasco’s Food and Liquor. I can honestly say that both of those albums have changed my life.

Moving away from my simple sketches I did much higher quality drawings and scanned them into the computer, as well as took photos of myself and from the Internet, all to redraw, digitally, in illustrator.

For the first critique I was very close to my piece, so it was hard to hear that a lot of people thought my drawings of roots looked to much like tentacles; however, I feel as if I successfully over came this, trying different techniques, in my revision process. In the end, I think that listening to their advice made my piece much better overall.

The final piece that is before you depicts the words “Music is Roots is Dan Kozerski,” which represents the literally growth of roots. Roots very much follow the idea of one thing leading to another. For me, music is in my roots and roots make me who I am. In the middle are two divided pieces showcasing the importance of the two albums I spoke about before. The top heads represent the artist, and the bottom heads represent me. The leaves within their heads represent the growth of the mind from the musical piece, which is located within an entanglement of roots between the heads. Very simple, abstract versions of the album artwork denote the artists’ record.

This piece is very close to me, and I had a lot of fun creating it. I think it would be cool to maybe expand on this idea to incorporate different genres. I could see it becoming a very large series. That being said, I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.