our loving father

SLOVENSKO

two and a half years ago an old laptop got retired from my use. the life goes on, but i still have valuable documents and fruits of my artistic endeavour. 

last night i copied some of these to my new computer. and i found an interesting unfinished presentation. it was conceived as a device to teach children a very nice song, but the old toshiba was not as able as laptops are today, and packed with 1010101 and the like. and you can not teach a song in soooo slooooow tempo. this is the principal reason the presentation was left undone. now, i got an urge to illustrate those two more lines. whatever happens, i will show you here some of the slides, and tell you how they were made.

i first drew a scene using a blue marker. i scanned it and inverted it in the openoffice.com draw. it can be, that i imported it into paintbrush directly. anyhow, this is where i added colours with the dropper tool. but before preceding to the coloured slides, let me note that the initial movement is an illusion of zooming out the scene to rivet the viewer to the screen. ambitious, ha? :) it is attained by stretching the drawing beyond the dimensions of the screen frame, and diminishing it in the next two steps to the right size.

although the song in the original very appropriately enumerates all the environments the life is found - who made ocean, earth and sky? - the slovenian song writer skipped the first element. (well, to translate the above verse into slovenian, one needs almost double number of syllables: 13 instead of 7) but if not starting with the water, as the biblical account begins, our illustration parallels the void and formless state of the planet before the creation by presenting the scene as if taken by night, which gives it the possibility of 'climbing' towards the last word in the first line - earth. (in slovenian the opening verse reads: who created [this grand] earth, with the parenthesis added here for metrical purposes)

the scene is than gradually illuminated, while the lyrics gives the answer to the question formerly put: God, our loving father. this answer is repeated in every even verse. and this is  how we conclude the first third of the stanza.

each of both slovenian stanzas comprises three questions and the same answer which is repeted even in the musical sense. if the song would be sung by two person alternately, with one asking and the other answering, the latter would sing the same thing three times. (next week, when you visit this blog, search for the music i plan to add as well; i recorded it on the electronic chimes (this is why i wished the children learn the song), a sound very similar to celesta, an instrument tchaikovsky (funny, is not ch enough? obviously the english spelling of his name came from french, the language of the russian nobility of old times) got from paris for his ballet nutcracker. it is heard in the dance of the sugar plum fairy. gorgeous indeed! the register, i mean. you will judge the music yourself.

well, i see that i ought to present you the the rest of the story in two other posts.

so long then.