Brief 1 - Design is About Doing: Evaluation

My initial research into different album artists such as Leif Podhajsky and Storm Thorgerson really helped me to get an understanding of what makes album art work and even sell. After this I printed off the song lyrics to Elbow - Grounds for divorce and began to analyse what the lyrics meant and also how they could be interpreted. I began to sketch out thumbnails from ideas that I had jotted down and I found that by drawing ideas out I suddenly found I got more ideas as I was drawing. 

At first I really liked the idea of showing time going by flowers dying which linked to part of the lyrics where he is giving his wife flowers but they are doing no good. However as I began to develop this idea I found it really didn't work and I was better off moving onto other thumbnails. 

First Idea

In the end I settled with two ideas that you can see below. The first one was the painting of the dying rose with the hand reaching for it. The song touches on many issues and so the concept behind this idea is aiming to touch on a few of them. The red rose dying symbolises how his marriage is failing even though he is buying his wife flowers they both know ‘it does them know good’, it isn’t working; the marriage is still dying  like the flower. The second thing it touches on is his friends’ death, the dying flower symbolises the passing away of his friend almost like putting a flower on a grave. Death is part of nature and the flower dying helps to illustrate this. In my painted version the hand is dropping the flower, like it has slipped out of the hand to suggest him having to let go of his dying marriage and deceased friend. 

I found with this idea it looked good with the type but the brief specified that I couldn't put any type on it which gives away the album name, I found that without the type the piece looked off balance and just slightly odd. As you can see below the type works well with this drawings and helps to balance out the piece.

Second Idea

The concept behind this idea was having the cigarettes slowing burning out to represent how his time is running out. The cigarettes are an iconic image of the pub he can’t seem to get away from and represent his addiction to alcohol and smoking as well as incorporating the idea of a habitual routine; smoking to help with the loss of his friend and with the failure of his marriage.  

I wanted to use a darker colour to reinforce the concept of the piece, since it is not a happy subject nor a happy song I felt a bright colour would be inappropriate and also remove some of the seriousness. Looking at one of the Elbow album variations I decided to work with a similar colour scheme because it felt appropriate to their old art work as well as the topic in which the song was based. The colours have worked well in relation to what they are meant to compliment as well as reinforcing the serious side of the song. 

I really enjoyed this project as I felt I learnt quite a lot from it. For instance the idea I initially wanted to run with looked great with the title, however as soon as it was removed it just didn't work anymore. This really showed me that although something may work it needs to fit in with the brief guidelines. 

I found that I did push myself on this project to go further and try out methods that I hadn't previously, for example one idea I had was of snooker balls moving around so that the camera would capture their lines of travel. For this I needed to rent a camera - something I hadn't previously done, as well as trying to get the settings to work. In the end I found this really didn't work; perhaps to my lack of experience or just the strength of the idea/concept. However even though it could be seen as a few days wasted I really benefited from that time trying to get it to work and figure out why it wasn't. As well as trying to resolve it as a problem.