Unit 3 and 6 Essay

In unit 39 we had to design a CD cover and for this unit my main influence was music, but when I say music I don’t mean just listening to it then having the right inspiration for my assignment, I mean the words, the colour schemes, lyrics, genre, the music videos, everything that makes music. Initially I was going to just focus on one of the above for the influence of my project but then looking into all of them I was more or less thinking about how many more ideas I could develop if I look into everything and get ideas or examples for all and develop them in my own way. When it  came down to me designing my final CD cover you could just tell that this CD cover had a lot of thought go into it so you can see visibly that it has been developed.

In this project my Artist influences were people like Lee Kan who designed the tribute album covers for Amy Winehouse. Lee Kan was one of my main influences because when he designed her album covers he designed it so that it told us a small part about the musician herself, I say this because he designed and album cover where he says “I have used the ripped strips of paper to show the broke person that Amy was because of the broken life that she had”, him saying this tells us that he didn’t just look into other graphic designers for inspiration he used the musician herself and didn’t look at her publicised life for inspiration he looked into her personal life.  That piece was a big inspiration for my final piece so I thought it had depth to it which was something that I wanted my art piece to have as well.

The style he chose to do his final CD cover design in looks like some of Pablo Picasso’s work which makes me think whether Picasso had some kind of an influence on Lee Kan, then it gets me into thinking about post impressionism and that there art work looks similar, the strips of paper shows the same misshapen face that Picasso had in his portraits. The only difference is that because they were both different times century wise their work matches the eras that they live in.

Lee Kan and Pablo Picasso were both my artist influences in this project especially through my development process that brought me to my final CD cover design, although my final piece didn’t go under the art movement of cubism and doesn’t look similar to Lee Kan or Picasso’s my development work you can see the connection and the influence that these artists had on me and my work and the influence that the movement all together had on me.

To develop my own ideas I first did some brain storming recording my ideas visually a spider diagram, after that I went on to collect some research such as screen shots from music videos, previous album covers, photograph of personal and public life I then did some media experiments using stencils that I made, bubble wrap, sticks, coloured paper, string, paint etc. After doing my media experiments I edited and merged everything together using Photoshop I layered all of my colour experiments making different abstract CD designs.

My final design I wanted to show the reggae side of my artist Amy Winehouse and I got the idea for it from the poster that a fan made of her and Bob Marley so I decided to make an album cover as if she was a reggae singer something different from what she normally does.