I struggled to find a starting point with the secret 7 brief, so I started by drawing and listening to the songs I had chosen. (Clearest Blue by CHVRCHES and The Less I Know The Better by Tame Impala.) As the brief specifically states that you should be able to tell the song by the image I quickly realised this wouldn’t be a good way to go and so changed my method.
My next step was to take lines from the songs and draw from those, I began with the CHURCHES song and broke down the lyrics. From my research into their previous album covers, I noticed they always use the V symbol, and they’re album artwork is always quite graphic. I wanted to keep the graphic look but combine my illustrative tone alongside it so that it was something new that they hadn’t already got but also was recognisable because of the V symbol.
I continued breaking down the lyrics to the CHVRCHES song and started looking for motifs and symbols I could use to represent the song. I decided it would all be in blue tones which I think might be a little overdone considering the song is called Clearest Blue, but it also needs to be recognisable just from the image.
With the Tame Impala song I also broke down the lyrics to try and figure out the imagery. The song features a few characters and so I thought I would play off that because then it would be instantly recognisable to people who knew the song well. I created characters and used the story line of the song to make simple roughs. I think the ‘Trevor’ necklace is the strongest motif as its one of the main characters in the song.
I wanted to use the Trevor motif and so had to develop a character to wear it. The girl mentioned in the song comes across as manipulative so I played with that and came up with a few drawings that I plan on taking into mono print so that I can get a nice texture and atmosphere to the image.