Developing Cover Ideas

This is one of the ideas I developed from the sketchbook. I wanted to go for something that resembled that 50s illustrative style, trying to make the image of the blue jay more stylized. Developing this in Illustrator allowed me to experiment with different colour combinations in order to make something vibrant but also suggesting that slight vintage feel. Thats why I went for lots of pastel and slightly off-colour shades of various vibrant colours. I do like this design, I think it's quite eye-catching, however the coloured waves are a bit messy and could be made smoother and more consistant.

This idea was partly inspired by Imelda May covers that feature an almost silhouette of a woman featured in the design. This cover was designed around mixing rockabilly imagery with floral brushes to suggest the more natural, flowing nature of soul music. Again I went for a more stylized design using vibrant colours against the off white 'torn paper' style background which is inspired by many posters from the 40s and 50s and is often associated with 'retro' influenced design. I used the floral brushes I'd found through researching illustration techniques. Making something that looked very natural proved quite difficult but I was quite happy with the result. It does need development though, but that will be decided by the client if they like the initial idea.

For this idea I tried to create something with a bit more energy, without turning it down so much to see how the client would like it. I experimented with creating different brushes in Illustrator and settled on a rainbow colour brush I made using the line tool. These colourful patterns are more influenced by funk albums from the 70s and covers like Josh Stone's album. The client was interested in seeing lots of bright imagery so I tried to include a range of different things emanating from the gramophone speaker.

I'll show these designs to the client during the upcoming meeting on the 7th November and ask for their feedback.