Month: November 2018

Album cover for Miles Davis

avchristiansen

“Knowledge is happiness to me”
Miles Davis

When looking for examples of visual communication, album covers are great, they have a long history of using creativity in all aspects to communicate what the music will be like before the customer buys the album.

To start the assignment I watched a few interviews with Miles Davis, to get a feel for his character and the things he liked. Which lead me to look into his own artworks.

He also mentioned some of his idols like Picasso and Dali, he also mentioned some albums he wish his were like, which were Sting’s album Sting and Mick Jaggers called Primitive Cool. All the materials are in the end under research, if you are interested in watching it too.

1st brainstorm

But to start my product development I did a whole lot of different designs while I watched the interviews and listened to the single. These are a mix of notes of observations and designs.

Mood board

After my first brainstorming I had to narrow my ideas down so that I could start working on the overall design and details.

To do that I put together a mood board filled with pictures that represent my interpretation of Miles Davis’s personal style and character. In it I have put pictures of Miles Davis himself, his own art, art he was inspired by and art that represents his past like being a pimp and his addiction to heroin. I chose to incorporate his past because these are things that his fans will know and recognise they were also things he talked openly about, in an unashamed manner, which really says a lot about the vibe he gave “I don’t care what others think”.

This attitude is also clear in his naming of the album “So What”

2nd brainstorm

This leads me to my second brainstorm where I worked with composition, colour theory and abstraction.

Detail work

I now had a more refined idea of what I was going for and why. I wanted the initial focus to be on Miles Davis’s silhuet, which I wanted to achieve by using bright white centrally placed on a dark background, the next thing I wanted focus on was his signature in the top, which is made in a solid white as well, a white edge will lead the eye from one to the other.

And the final thing for people to notice will be the woman standing on the other side of Miles Davis, she is popping out of the picture by being red in contrast to the blue/black background.

I decided to try a few media’s to try different styles with the design and see what would give me the result I wanted. I tried with coloured pens and pencils, lead,watercolour, oil paints and acrylics.

Final product

My final product is made with acrylics on A4 watercolour paper. To create the 30 x 30 cm paper I needed I taped together my prepped watercolour paper, where after I cut it in the desired size.

I started with a background inspired by my previous acrylic piece and the watercolour piece.

The bent in the paper that came from taping the two pieces together was placed as a third of the paper, so I made the white line and Miles Davis figure where after I did the signature and white spiral.

After coming that far I did not want the album to look cheap, so I made a colour swatch to compare with the almost finished product.

I quickly decided to use a tad of black in my read colour to allow the white to be the primary contrast.

When the woman was painted in and the product picture was done, I got an idea when looking at the red colour swatch. I wanted it to be the actual case of the CD, and my final piece to be a sleeve over it. This would give a little more supprise and colour to the album, it would also make it seem more expensive and in a better quality because of the added packaging.

Understanding the artist

To get a feel for who Miles Davis was and what he liked I watched a few interviews with him. (linked below under research)

 

Image result for optical illusions

Research

Youtube recording of “So What” by Miles Davis 1959

Youtube interviews:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdbncehVoqk

Miles Davis’s personal art:
https://www.milesdavis.com/gallery/miles-artwork/

Examples of other albums from the same period: 
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=album+cover+1959&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiGpJipj8LeAhVLBsAKHYkACRAQ_AUIDigB&biw=1280&bih=610&dpr=1.5#imgrc=_

Analysis of “So What” by Miles Davis:
https://lkellunis.weebly.com/analysis-of-miles-davis-so-what.html

Ways of seeing

avchristiansen

 “Talent is good

Practice is better

Passion is best”

– Frank Ilyod Wright

 

Abstraction and understanding of drawing as a tool and practice 

Doing the first week of our “Ways of Seeing” module we worked on understanding visual communication as a tool that we can all use and understand as humans, but as something, we, the class, should also practice and improve for professional reasons.

It started as a lecture on how we understand visuals, colours, shapes and optical illusions. It is a primal language that we as designers and design students can use to communicate values and create intuitive user experiences.

We went on to do an exercise on blind drawings. We were to only look at our partner on the other side of the table, and try to draw them without looking at the paper. It gives some interesting results and says a lot about eye to hand coordination, but even more interesting is the fact that we can still see who and or what the image shows, even though it is simply scribbles that we have blindly put on a page. We then went on to one line drawings, where we were not allowed to lift our pen.

A new media

But visual communication is so much more than a perfect picture, it is sketches, scribbles and physical models.

We were allowed and encouraged to have fun with the portraits, so the next part of the project was to incorporate conductive inc and LEDs into new portraits. I chose to stay with a one-line drawing cause I quite like the combination of the aesthetic simplicity and the intriguing complicity of them. I chose to show the inc and the wires in my final drawing to give it a bit of extra interest.

 

Visual communication

To work with communication we conducted interviews on each other. The computer interviews were to be impartial so that the data did not get corrupted. After my interview with Helena I looked over her answers and took in the feel I decided to do three portraits in one, to symbolise the three people she is. One that is polished and perfect, to be displayed (I used Copic Markers for this, to give it the polished effect) the second one her in her national outfit, to show her deep connection to her culture (I used watercolours for this one, to show the playfulness and happiness she showed when talking about it) and the final portrait, her school self, laid back but a perfectionist at heart ( for this I used oil paints, to showcase her creativity and the oils also work as a mask, and I liked this because she can seem hard to get to know)

 

Practice makes perfect

After the portraits were finished we started out reading week, and for the reading week we had two daily drawing assignments, one was to draw an item that had in some way been influential on that day, and the second was to do an interpretation of a map, in whatever way we wanted. So I ended up with 10 drawings, 5 objects and 5 maps. The papers are all dates with the day they were sketched and the day they were finished. Most were drawn Monday, Wednesday or Friday.

These were my five objects:

And these my 5 maps:

Drawing and models as a means to draw attention

In the third week we started doing visual CV’s, for mine, I wanted to make it interactive and fun like a playbook, so I spend half the first day on doing a draft and then I started working in Photoshop. The drawings themselves took me a lot of work because of the interactive components, and I have not been able to do everything I want on it yet. However, the point of the CV is for us to send it out as applications for summer internships.

After working on my computer with it I printed out the first few pages and made them interactive as I had planned them.

I quickly realised how expensive it will be to print, not to mention sent the entire thing. So I will be making it into an interactive PDF. I haven’t done that yet, so I’ve decided to attatch it as a large gallery, where tapping through it will show how it should be.

Link in PDF

Our final project has been to create a character with a story. More specifically we were to create a pop-up character, using paper mechanics techniques, incorporate LED lights into it, with the help of an Arduino and some programming, and then we were tasked to visualise the story of our character.

The story for mine is here

And this is her lying down and reading her book with rosy cheeks.

All the work that had been compiled during the module had been placed in a sketchbook we created on the first day. As the final small project in this module, I made a little video of going through my sketchbook. For the editing, I used Adobe Premiere Pro and found royalty free music on https://taketones.com/