Secret 7

Brief 

To create a 7 inch vinyl album sleeve for a music artist, without using the artists name or song title.
The choice of artists are:

Public Enemy
Elton John
Naz
Jessie Ware
Hiam
Laura Marling
Nick Drake


Guidelines

Participants may submit artwork or a photograph

Entries must not include text relating to the host artist nor song title
Create the front of the 7" sleeve, only this will be visible in the gallery
Dimensions should be 184mm x 184mm with a 3mm bleed, so in total 190mm x 190mm. The bleed will not show on the front of the sleeve so please don't design anything in this area that you want to be visible. 
 Original submisions should be produced in CMYK 300dpi and either TIFF, JPEGS or EPS file formats. 
Work must be original not using third party pre existing copyright materials.  



Initial ideas 

I firstly started off drawing different types of strange creatures that had features that wouldn't normally be associated with them. These would then relate to 'a beast' referring to the song title but not using the name of the song or name of the artist.  

 

 

I then created some thumbnails of more ideas trying to take into account the composition of the vinyl cover and ways i could use the square to create an interesting layout that draws the attention of the viewer in.  

 

 After looking at these thumbnails i thought the best ones were the wolf sat on the rock, the one with the face right up close and the wolf that is almost climbing out the square.

Next i then started to looking at different ways of drawing the wolf sat on the rock.

With this drawing above i came up with the idea of putting somebody in the rock so it was like they were 'sleeping with the beast'. This composition is far too close though. 
 

IDEAS FOR THE BACKGROUND

i thought the best one would of been the mountain range to create a gloomy place in the middle of nowhere.


Creating the background

To start i drew mountain shapes and gave them all gradients so it looked like they weren't flat. I also made the colours lighter as it went backwards so it created the look of distance.

This is the finished background, i changed the height of the mountain at the front.

Creating the person 

To create the person at the bottom of the rock i took pictures of my flat mate in a curled up position so they looked scared and in a confined space.  

  
I next started to draw around my flat mate. 

 

I tried to create tension in the hands to emphasize the confined space and how scared.

After creating the person i used the same process to draw the wolf from a photo. This was also done when creating the wings, i then placed them all together, when colouring the wolf in black it didn't go to plan but the outcome looked very interesting with parts of the animal looking strange and some parts missing, making it more beast looking. 



These are the different colours i selected which i could then select my favorite one to send in. 
 

 

i thought the strongest one was the bottom one, where i used the graphic pen effect on illustrator, i really like the contrast and how the shadow has been portrayed on the mountains. This adds a lot more depth than just the flat colours on the other designs. 



FINAL DESIGN