Major Project - The Album Artwork

Since my last post about my major project a lot has changed. Over the Easter holidays I decided the work I was producing wasn't strong enough and that it didn't really fit in with the overall ambiance of Louie's music. I think this was due to the colours I was using being too bright and the artwork overall not fitting in with it's genre.

As a bit of fun and to get my mind working, I began to draw a new character which had been stuck in my head for a while. The character took form of a bug and I decided to use a neon colour scheme. I then began thinking about the story of this bug and decided that actually it may work quite well if I incorporated it into Louie's album cover, seeing as I was unhappy with the ones I had previously designed. I then mocked up a quick thumbnail and began designing a setting. I took into account the different formats I would need to use this illustration for. I knew I wanted it to be available to print in vinyl format and also wanted to be able to animate it in a format that would fit Spotify. I therefore kept all the important things such as the character and all the text in the middle of the canvas so that I could easily draw above and below in order to extend the illustration for a phone screen.

Following this, I began adding colours and textures, all the while taking into account how I might be able to animate them in the future. I decided that I wanted this to be a simple looping animation, and so thought about having the neon signs flicker and perhaps the clouds moving in the sky. Here was how the final album cover turned out:

As well as this, Louie had decided he wanted to release some of his songs as singles, and so I decided that although my previous designs were not perfect, I did still like the original concepts and I could easily improve upon them and make them more relevant. I was really happy with the original animation test I did of the man falling through the clouds and also the illustration of the foot in the puddle. I decided that because I had drawn the clouds the same on the album cover as I had on the original test animation, I could keep this concept and link it to my new design. I then changed the colours and decided to incorporate the bug into the single cover, so that a theme is made. This was also possible with the original foot/puddle illustration. I decided to change up the colour scheme so that it matched the other two illustrations and then change the human foot for the bug's foot.