Where I Belong

Description

Human beings have had many mystical and psychedelic encounters with higher levels of reality and the beings inhabiting them.These encounters have spawned several different divine beings and realms for human beings to hold sacred throughout the years.

They have inspired culture, mythology, religion, science, art and all other aspects of life in the most awe inspiring ways; without which imagining humanity as it stands today would be impossible.

Where I belong is a celebration of the different ideas people have had about the transcendent realms and it's inhabitants for inspiring humanity to push beyond their limits and lending it a helping hand from time to time. This piece took me a while to finish. In the following paragraphs I try to tell you the story of how it came to be.

Initial Concept And Making The Elements

I have always been fascinated with esoteric and mystery schools of the ancient ages, ranging all the way back from Zoroastrian ideas and mythology to the vikings of the middle ages, there is wisdom to be found in each and one of these traditions. I had the idea of combining different symbolic higher entities from different traditions in one image, the initial idea was much more different as you can see by this initial sketch:

Then I started designing the different elements on the screen. This part took the most amount of time because I am always adding or removing characters, buildings and everything that fits the vibe of the painting. First I draw every element's line art: Some time after that the line art of the piece was done and I started coloring, which came up to a rough draft of the painting. I make sure in this stage that all the elements are in different layers and are ordered in the correct way to give the viewer a perception of the depth of the painting since I don't use any other method of discerning depth in the painting. Now that the static part is finished we move to the music. Music

I have lived most of my life in Iran, and the great thing about it is that we have our own ethnic music, I used to play electric guitar since I finished high school but then I started gravitating to more Persian sounds, I discovered an ancient Persian instrument called the Tanbur and started studying it, after I was proficient enough I started to incorporate it in my music. I wanted to go for a vibe of grandeur and awe in this piece's music and what better way to utilize that than some good old phrygian dominant, I composed the track initially to be around 60 seconds, but after countless edits and listening I found the best timing for it would be around 30 seconds. Which came down to this: After that I had to play and record the Tanbur on that and with some improvisation and luck, the result came out better than expected.

Animation

This part is one of the most consuming aspects of the work, but it adds so much to the piece that I cannot think of skipping, it just "animates" the drawing you know? Pun intended.

The process here is that each element is selected and pre-composed and animated according to some repeating loops so that the entire thing can loop at the end. After that's finished we have to go for a render.

I had to render this one 6 times because of my computer's not so great processing power, I wasn't able to view the animation in real time and each time I found a minor thing that went wrong, after many tries I succeeded.

Then the piece gets encoded from a 14GB file down to the current size of around 19 MB. and we are done and it's ready to mint.

Due to the support of my amazing previous collectors and clients on OpenSea I was able to mint on foundation this time which feels a little more professional.

My Final Thoughts

As a self learning artist I am grateful for the NFT space to give me a chance to make a living with the thing I love to do,I had a rough journey until I got to the point of deciding to do art full time but I never look back. It's an amazing journey and seeing my work become better and more refined by the passage of time I am grateful to be part of this amazing journey called life.

Terms

By buying this NFT you agree that:

• The artist can use the liking of the artwork in exhibitions, his own social media and online presence, etc.

• You can use the liking of the artwork in case of making derivatives, private prints (for your own use), and considering fair use in your own creative projects.

• You cannot resell the liking of the artwork.