Unit 8 - My Album Cover
Album covers are such a vital part of the creation of an album/EP which I feel is often overlooked. They display the unique ability to give you a visual glimpse into the music you're going to hear. This 'packaging' provides the ability to create and mould the listeners first impression of the song, so it's not something you can easily dismiss. A good cover should encapsulate what the music is going to be all about, as well as manage to give of the same mood and overall vibe. As I stated in one of my secondary research blog posts, many values can have an effect on the covers impression. One of the most important aspects I believe, is colour.
Since we first created our band name 'Glass Star' I've always associated it with black, white, red and blue. Since we begun getting into the flow of actually producing and writing music, I've started to lean more into the theme of monochromatic colour schemes for our album cover. Below I've put together a collage of some album covers I find most appealing and I would like to model our own cover after it.
As you can see, these covers are all rather varied. I like the idea of the image containing a person but it not being the main focus or it only having a body part within it. My pianist Ed also enjoys digital drawing and editing, as do I so I think a design with an element of digital creativity would also be fun. In my other blog posts, you can view my research on different album covers where I also talk about different colours and their effects. I would really like for our album to be just black and white as I feel it best suits our vibe but with a more intricate drawing or pattern to catch the viewers eye. A good example of this is Tally Hall's 'Good & Evil' and 'Currents' by Tame Impala.
Update April 21 - I'd also like to add that since we're quickly approaching the deadline, we, as a band, have been thinking about what to name our debut EP. After much discussion and some suggestions, I think we're going to go with a self-titled EP and just name it 'Glass Star' as I think it's a simple yet effect route. I have also recently made some prototype designs on what the cover could look like which I'll list and give a short description of below.
Update 15 May - After a lot of back and forth discussion, we’ve finally created our album cover. We each had a photo of ourselves taken with our instruments which we then created an outline of and filled in black. This was added onto a monochrome background which is very similar to my concept designs where I suggested something similar to Tally Hall. The main disagreement we ran into was the placement of our band name. We were very split on where to put it on the cover, or whether to feature it at all. I definitely wanted it to be incorporated on the artwork but I was thinking in the bottom center. We tried out quite a few different placements which I’ve featured below before settling on the final artwork.
Original inspiration and first demo version using stock images:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is the original photo used for my silhouette outline, taken on the stage in our college Llwyn Y Bryn. Below is the finished outline as well as a time-lapse of the process:
This all led to our final cover which will be used on our EP project. I really like how this all turned out and I especially love how well the monochrome colours suit the final result:
