Psalm 107:4
cover the earth
I will praise thee, O Lord, among the people: and I will sing unto thee among the populations. (Psalm 107: 4 DR)
Although I’m not usually a fan of abstract art, I do have a soft spot for acrylic pouring art. This could possibly be because I’ve found it very useful for implementing into my design and animation work.
Notwithstanding such an admittedly utilitarian admiration, I find it fascinating in that it seems to combine skill and many varying techniques (such as molds, air pressure, centrifugal force, scraping, mixed media, etc.) with a certain degree of forces beyond one’s control, such as gravity, the viscosity of the paint, etc. There’s a certain satisfaction in watching the paint start in a contained spot and then move out (however it does so) to cover the canvas and create something where there was nothing before.
In this verse the Psalmist declares his intention to praise the Lord among the peoples of the earth. This same verse as used in Psalm 56 is spoken by David, who as king extended his reign and the worship of God not simply in some spiritual sense, but practically speaking. George Leo Haydock in his commentary on this verse has a brief observation:
Nations. David made various conquests, which prefigured those of Christ, to whom the rest of the psalm belongs. (St. Agustine) (Worthington) (Haydock, Commentary on Psalm 107:4)
The conquests of Christ are, of course, the spread of his Church throughout the world through the centuries. Daniel had prophesied this long before in his vision of a stone cut without human hands that destroys all kingdoms and fills the world:
But in the days of those kingdoms the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, and his kingdom shall not be delivered up to another people, and it shall break in pieces, and shall consume all these kingdoms, and itself shall stand for ever. (Daniel 2:44 DR)
In this manner this psalm is fulfilled in the Church which fills the whole earth and offers its praises to God amongst all the people.
In this .gif I didn’t have a specific meaning in mind, but rather an aesthetic. To be more precise, I had been recently looking into variable width fonts for a project and how to hack them into After Effects, since it does not as yet natively support them.
There’s not yet a great to do it, but I kind of liked the idea of animating a font as if it was variable width, but also adding in some shape morphing to give it an interesting look.
Initially I was playing around with some distortion effects because I was lazy and knew what I’d probably have to do, but didn’t want to. Well, the distortion effects worked about as poorly as I suspected, so I ended up converting all the characters into shape layers and then manually modified the paths for each converted character.
Tedious, sure. But I think it turned out nicely, and it didn’t end up being as bad as I initially feared.
For the background I found a splotchy grid texture (the turquoise blobs) and added the Ripple distortion to it. I also utilized an abstract rings image and added some Turbulent Displace to that and set a blending mode so that it mostly blended into the background. I then duplicated it and matted that one to the blobby grid.
Enjoy.
I will praise thee, O Lord, among the people:
and I will sing unto thee among the populations.
(Psalm 107: 4 DR)
View a higher quality version of this gif here: