Shortly before we broke up for Easter, through David, a fellow student was referred to me with an opportunity to design and produce an album cover for his band "Hollowbeak." I was rather nervous at first when being asked to do this, again my fear of letting someone down or not producing what they wanted was all to great. But once I spoke to him a good few times it was clear he was rather easy going and had lots of straight forward ideas, and the more of those he had, the better for me.
I think when doing this
piece I was very nervous to produce something the best I could considering it
was a more “graphic” project than what I would normally focus on. Despite this,
I went on and created, step by step, different elements of the album cover
until the final project was complete. I began with using a pencil and ink as
initial sketches and then uploaded them to my computer in order to digitally
line it and colour it up. Another aspect I was rather nervous about was the
colours that the client had described, as we all know I’m stuck in my simple
and pastel colours. However, using visual research from comics and cartoons
which use the same style and colours as what I was going for, I felt much more
confident in what I was doing. I also ended up creating a gradient like effect
on the wings of the bird through blending and painting in a purple/grey and
bright green together, much like you see on pigeons and parakeets. And although
I was just creating the separate images to go on the album cover, I mocked up
this idea to symbolise what I myself was going for in the final outcome.
I think there are a few
obvious strengths and weaknesses in my work for this project: one of my
weaknesses for this piece is that I don’t pretend to know a lot about graphic
design, with all of its confusing measurements and such, which is rather
apparent in this piece. However, I do feel as though I did make a good attempt
as setting out the elements I had, given the tool I had. One of my strengths
for this piece was definitely the creation of the image itself, the bird-like
monster which I was given the task of creating looked really effective against
the dark and creepy background, giving and eerie and grungy looking effect on
the whole image, I used a water colour effect on this bird to give it a
vibrant, but washed out (?) effect at the same time.
Something I can take
away from this project is definitely working in a darker canvas, and being able
to make colours stand out against those backgrounds in a tasteful way without
making it look too distracting or off putting.
Hollowbeak and it's Artwork can be found on Facebook.
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