This graphic of four scars is synonymous with werewolves and danger. It was the first thing that came into my head when I saw what the song was called. However, the song is about the opposite of this and focuses on the emotions of this werewolf. Therefore I couldn’t do the scars on their own but had to juxtapose them with something emotional and sensitive.
My first thoughts on what could represent emotion in this piece were flowers. They are steeped in connotations about emotion and sensitivity and therefore I thought it could be quite a powerful image to have them growing from this violent and totally opposite symbol of the scars.
I took it a step further and wondered what a flower made of these scars would look like but although it looks cool, it doesn’t convey any emotion at all but rather the opposite. It looks cold , industrial and aggressive.
Leaving the concept of flowers behind me, I moved on too other symbols that strongly imply emotion and settled on tear drops. There are linked even more strongly to emotion because they are a direct result of strong emotions like love, joy and of course, sadness. I much preferred this to the flower idea because of its simplicity and effectiveness.
Somehow I wanted to add the eye of a wolf so I could have another strong link to werewolves other than the scars. I drew a wolf eye with a tear drop flowing from it.
I liked the effect the wolf eye had and attempted to combine it with the scars from earlier. The thing I liked a lot about this design is that the scars also look like the bars of a cage, in the same way the man is trapped inside this monster at a full moon. However, Cat Power sticks to fairly simplistic album covers and this was getting pretty detailed so I had to step it down a bit.
Colour is also a signifier of emotion and therefore, instead of using flowers, I tried to combine a strong purple colour. This also works because Cat Power uses various shades of blue and purple in her album covers.
Finally, although I wasn’t really routing for the idea, I tried it with some more flowers blossoming out of the scars over a coloured background. Although it is somewhat effective, I’m not a fan and think it loses its simplicity.
I wanted to take this project off the page and experiment with it physically. To do this, I cut some scratch marks into a piece of card to do some photography with.
This was the first photo I took with it and I tried a nice calm landscape just outside my house. It’s somewhat effective but it doesn’t imply enough emotion.
I went back to the flowers idea and took some pictures of a vase full of flowers while holding the card up in front of it. This photo is slightly edited hence the strange colouring.
I liked what were this was going and so I tried to add a tear drop. The first attempt I made didn’t work because I used super glue and it just soaked into the paper. This attempt was made using epoxy resin and it did work, rather well.
I took it back outside and tried taking photos of various landscapes and flowers but this was the most successful. As you can see the drip was getting more and more pathetic as time went on. Although they were decent photos, they weren’t dramatic enough and so I wanted to use rose but I didn’t have access to any.
I took a previous image and cropped out the background in the slash marks so I could photoshop some roses into the back. I did this on a computer with images I found online. I was very happy with this and it perfectly achieved the balance of aggression, emotion and drama I was looking for.
The last thing to do was to add the title etc. I chose to use this very intimidating and dramatic font because it emphasises the strength and fear that werewolves are represented to posses. However it was a bit over the top in my mind.
This was the final digital version that I came up with. I used a more scriptive font because I thing it compliments the whole piece well. It also infers to the horror romanticism that has tended to go with werewolves throughout the years. Overall I’m very happy with this as a final product, its effective and striking whilst maintaining an element of simplicity. The contrast created between the white foreground and the richness of colour in the roses is powerful to look at. On top of this the shapes are simple and elegant, it all compliments each other. I really like the tear drop and I think it adds a whole new dynamic to the piece without adding much physically. However the font could be better, although it does work I feel like its the wrong scale in relation to the rest of the piece and requires more presence. Beefing the actual font up would help but that wasn’t an option available to me with the font.
