Carmen Trio

Carmen Trio

I don't even remember how or why the idea came into my head, but some time at the end of January or early February I got the notion to do some drawings in graphite and record the sound of pencil on paper so that I could make ASMR videos. Here is the Wikipedia entry on ASMR (take it with however many grains of salt you usually require for that source):

Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR), sometimes auto sensory meridian response, is a tingling sensation that typically begins on the scalp and moves down the back of the neck and upper spine. A pleasant form of paresthesia, it has been compared with auditory-tactile synesthesia and may overlap with frisson.

ASMR signifies the subjective experience of "low-grade euphoria" characterized by "a combination of positive feelings and a distinct static-like tingling sensation on the skin". It is most commonly triggered by specific auditory or visual stimuli, and less commonly by intentional attention control. A genre of videos intended to induce ASMR has emerged, over 13 million of which had been published on YouTube by 2018.

And now I'm one more.

Enjoy your options.

The biggest differences in these videos versus my painting ones is that these are in real-time (my painting videos are time lapse), and the only audio here is the (intentionally and mostly) pencil on paper (my painting videos have music only). Of course, I'll be doing time lapse versions of these pencil drawings as well, especially because I love that format and why I've been making time lapse painting videos for over a year, now.

Because these three portraits are so similar, I decided to gang them up in one extra-long video to sort of lessen the repetition since there is a time lapse video for each drawing (so 4 videos instead of 6).

Here's my first ASMR video:

Carmen Trio A
17" x 14", graphite on Bristol board, 2021

Here's the short time lapse video for this portrait:

Once again, the model here is my friend, Ashley, wearing the dress from the Bizet opera Carmen. I've painted her in that dress a few times before, but this time all that's visible of it is the crinkly outline of the upper portion. I think it gives the portraits a nice sculptural bust-like look. It's a lovely dress, though, and I've enjoyed painting it over the years:

I had pencilled in these three portraits on sheets of Bristol board years (possibly more than a decade) ago, intending to make them into ink paintings. When I got the idea to make ASMR videos of drawings, these were the first available images all set up and ready to go.

I did these alternating between a 6B and a B pencil.