Brief:  To create an album cover plus lyric cards or booklet.

Response:  As required by the college brief, I picked out four tracks from the WAES L3 youtube channel, around which I would focus my artwork. I took inspiration from museum exhibits, old photos, artist’s media and the world around me when thinking out preliminary ideas with which to illustrate the lyrics and the album cover/title. I made sketches, took photographs and explored different ways of developing my ideas, both by hand and digitally.

I was also inspired by Mucha’s Four Seasons, where each woman personifies a different season. I mapped each song in my compilation to a different season as I worked through the booklet – Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter – so adding another dimension to my illustrations and a flow between the tracks. I named the compilation 23.5 degrees, which is the angle at which the Earth spins, so creating the seasons.

I used the Pen Tool in Adobe Illustrator to create page templates complete with bleed, margins, crop marks and score lines. As well as developing artwork for each spread, I also explored typography, sourcing public domain or open font license typefaces which worked with the artwork and helped to express the feel of each track. I created the front and back cover of the CD, the front and back cover of the leaflet, a spread for each track in the pull-out, and a “filler” spread in the leaflet to balance the pagination before putting the spreads for the booklet into Adobe In-Design in order to paginate the pull-out.