Paris Travel Series Art Album

Paris Travel Series Art Album Details

• Created by Katherine Barnett
• Music: See below for tracklist
• Tools to create video album: After Effects |Paintshop | Photoshop | Camera
• Trip Dates: December 8th – December 11th, 2021

Here are the art designs featured on the album.

Paris Travel Series Art Album features eleven art designs and an abstract art synthwave mix (9 designs in music video), featuring locations in Paris, France. You can watch the full music video and read more about each location I visited by clicking on the links above. Visit the shop here to see the finished designs made the album. 

An adventure of a lifetime… It sums up my trip to Paris perfectly. I never expected to go at the time but I thought if I don’t go now then maybe I wouldn’t have another chance. I talked about it a lot on this website but visiting Paris is an ultimate dream of mine for close to 20 years. It still feels quite amazing almost two years after visiting Paris for the first time.

I don’t want to go into too much detail about the album since I talk extensively about each design I made in the links above. Also, you can visit the Paris Travel Series Category Here to read stories and sadly struggles about the trip and while making the album. I started making this album at the beginning of 2022 but life and my mental state got in the way and I took several breaks before finishing. As a realist, I am not sure if I’m going to make another album. This album was the penultimate for me as an artist. I wanted to make something that I feel truly represents my love for color and Paris. I only had two and a half days in Paris but I did manage to visit or at least see a lot of attractions to take hundreds of pictures. The thumbnail for this post is of Moulin Rouge. I was going to make a design for this one but ran into some issues. However, I wanted to feature this place somewhere in my album.

Unfortunately, I wanted to feature more locations in the video but I didn’t want to make the file size  too big. It’s already close to 100 GBs and took me close to 5 hours to render on my computer. Plus… I took many bad photos throughout the trip. I also took 98 percent of my photos in the wrong resolution. I did the best I could given the major setback and some day in dreamland I would love to go back to Paris and make a part two album. Make designs for Moulin Rouge, The Concord, Musee d’Orsay, The Panthéon and more locations. I didn’t feature Notre Dame and Sleeping Faun in the album but you can view the final designs in the shop. I wasn’t too happy with Notre Dame and I might remake that design at some point but since I did officially finish it, I didn’t want to leave Notre-Dame out of the album. The picture on the left was taken at Musee d’Orsay. The clock was located right at the entrance. I love that museum and would definitely visit again. There were so many pieces of art that I loved.

The music video is something completely new for me. I think it’s perfect as a video album without design motion. The only video album that I made that rivals this one is my Annapolis travel series art album. I was able to add motion to the actual design. However, I am in love this video. It was my first time creating something like this in Adobe After Effects. For my Hartford album, I used a template I bought on videohive and added the designs but this time I created my own template. I found two transitions packs on videohive.net for logos and in-video transitions. I had someone create a logo for me on Fiverr and I edited the logo by adding the initials of my youtube channel. The logo was originally going to be for my new channel but I ran into some issues with uploading the video on that channel so I decided to keep it on my original channel (beatnikblends).

I saw a cyberpunk mix that had rain (particles) in the background of an image that was 2d but had some animation to make it look like 3d. I thought I wanted to create something like that but when I watched a couple of tutorials and tried to replicate the effect in Paintshop and After Effects, I had to make changes to the actual design to make it look more 3d. I’m sure there’s workarounds or something I don’t know that wouldn’t compromising the design but I decided to abandon that idea. I didn’t want to edit the designs in any way. I am still very new to using After Effects. Trust me, I was studying tutorials and working on this video for several months before creating the final design template but I don’t have years of experience. Instead of 3d I thought to use the camera to move the design around and also pan in a bit to make it look like it was moving. Not exactly 3d but at least it’s not a still 2d image. I also added triangular particles instead of the regular rain droplet particles to shake things up a bit. I really love it. I added a burn effect as well to the particles to make it appear like they’re glowing or perhaps burning throughout the design. One thing I absolutely love about some of the mixes I’ve seen on youtube is the animation circle visualization that reacts to the music. It’s called audio spectrum in After Effects. You can also use audio waveform for a similar effect. I adore this effect and played around with the colors to add more pop to the video and design. The great thing about making a template is if I ever do make another album, I don’t have to start from scratch.

It’s crazy… After the nightmare of putting this album together and just life in general, I find myself wanting to create another album. The pull of the adventure with color blends and nature. An exciting new destination… just thinking about it  makes me feel slightly giddy with wonder.  That’s why I know this was my purpose. To be on that endless journey with color and nature. It makes me feel happy. Being in Paris made me experience a undefinable moment of happiness.

Since this is more than likely my last album, I think I finished this journey on a high. I truly believe this is my best album. It’s been a long, wild ride, and it’s incredible to end my story with Paris. Thank you so very much for taking the time to visit this website.

Here’s the tracklist for the video album.

If you like this album, take a look at my other travel series albums. Start with my first stop: Philadelphia (My hometown).