Poster Design

For my poster I wanted to create something a bit different from the album cover but using the same colours and theme of an enchanted forrest. I decided to expand on the cd case and instead of having leaves on it I wanted to create the whole forest. I did this by painting various tree shapes using the same colours that i used for the leaves on my cd case. I then added lots of different black tree trunks, I wanted to make the bottom part of the forrest quite dense with tree trunks to add more mood and to darken the image slightly. Next I added a dark background that I created with watercolour and the hand written text. The final thing that I wanted to do to add more interest to the poster is add a light glare coming from the forest trees, I feel like this adds to the story of the CD case because it looks like the scene from the CD is happening in the forest where the light is coming from. Overall I am pleased with how the poster turned out because I feel like it sets the right tone for the album. 
The next step is to print out the poster design onto A2 paper that has a grey sort of colour to it. I decided on this colour because I didn't want to use a paper as dark as the cd case because I feel like it would make the image too dark, but I didn't want to use a bright white paper either so this is a good middle ground. 

Song list

I decided to have a scrawly hand written font for my CD case to fit in with the recycled home made feel that I want it to have, I stuck with this style for the song list. I hand wrote all of the song names with a unique style of keeping the pen on the page to create a really nice style of type. I then scanned in the text and darkened it. I decided to add the leaf detail from the front of the cd case around the edge of the songs to make it look more interesting. I really like how this turned out because I think the text fits in really well with the overall style. 

CD Font

I decided that for my CD case i wanted to have a hand written scrawly font. I experimented with trying out a few different writing styles but i didn't really like them that much. After giving it a thought I decided to try out writing the album name without taking the pen off the page and I really liked how it turned out so I decided to stick with this hand written style of font. 

Print tests

I printed out some tests using the same card that I plan on printing my final CD case on. I came across a few problems when printing out my album cover design so i'm not sure if ill stick with my original idea of printing it onto recycled card. I printed out a few different designs to see how that would look, The edges of the design all turned out quite well but the centre didn't work out at all and it looked really washed out and barely visible. I will now have to figure out what to do I think I might try using a more grey card rather than brown to see how that works out. 

Final album cover design experimentation

I have decided on the final design of my album cover. I decided to change my mind slightly from the original sketches because when i started to assemble the final image it looked like the Fred Perry logo and it didn't look dark enough to fit Agnes Obels style of music. I decided, after doing some artist research, that to change the mood I had to darken the colours to more dark red, brown and orange tones and change the composition slightly to make it look a bit more sinister. I also added some shadows to make the image a but more moody.  and I removed the tail from the woman as I was struggling with it compositionally and colour wise. Here is my new basic design, I will keep experimenting with it a bit longer and will also experiment with text placement. Also I would like to note that the final image will look slightly different as it will hopefully be printed on brown recycled card. 

After finishing the final design i decided to experiment with the image to see what it would look like with a bit more going on. I created a few different marks and shapes and scanned them in to layer into the image. After doing this I decided that it worked better with the original design because it looked a bit too messy with all of the other things going on in the image. I also tried out the image using only one of the textures that I created but didn't really like that either. 

Artist research Sandra Dieckmann

Sandra Dieckmann is an illustrator From Germany she creates beautiful artwork using what looks like pencil and watercolour. Her images often revolve around nature and wildlife but they always have an extra magical touch to them.  
I decided to research into this artist in particular because I was strugling with making my image more dark and this illustrator likes to show the darkness in folktales which is what i am aiming to do with this project. 

"The best folktales have a dark edge. Conversely, the best folk art pops with colour - perhaps as a visual way of whistling in the dark, perhaps a celebration of the richness of northern Europe's storytelling tradition. Sandra Dieckmann's nature inspired illustration has got that elusive, comfortable yet disquieting quality in spades."(Digital Artist Magazine)

The thing that I think works best within her work is the delicate lines, colours and patterns that she uses. I also really like the compositions used within her work, I feel like they are really considered and  really add to the mood of the image. I will look at the compositions and colours of her work and try and improve the mood in my own work.

CD Case Mock up

I am planning to make my CD case out of recycled card a bit like the material that cereal boxes are made out of.  I wanted to make a mock up to see how i will assemble the CD case and as I only have a few bits of this particular card I decided to just make it out of really rubbish paper. I have decided to create a simple folded card case for my base and to make the inside more interesting, I have decided to create an envelope style CD holder to keep the CD place so it won't fall out of the case.  The final design will look a lot better than this but it helped me to visualise how I will make the final product. 

Research Marimekko

Marimekko is a design company based in Helsinki, Finland that creates all sorts of things from their beautiful pattern designs. They have a collection of artists that create patterns and they generally all follow a house style. I decided to look at this company because they use colour really well and thats where I am struggling a bit.

For my research I decided to look at the artist that made Marimekko famous so that my research is more focussed. Maija Isola mainly created very bold patterns using flowers in various different colours. She drew most of her inspiration from traditional folk art, Nature,  trips around the world and modern visual art. all of these themes are clearly seen throughout her art. I think her use of colour works so well to complement her art, I especially like the vibrant deep red colours that she often uses. I want to use reds and oranges throughout my work so looking at this art really inspires me and helps me understand colour a bit more.

Market research

As we have to create a piece of merchandise for this project i decided to look at what Agnes Obel already sells to see the kind of things that she already sells to see if my work fits into the market. when looking at the merch in her online shop I noticed that it is all very dark and similar looking. The piece of march that i am creating is very different to the things in her online shop but i don't think that means that my design wont work. I think that the things in her shop are too similar and boring and they could probably do with a bit more variation. The merch on her website seems to be more focussed on the artist rather than anything else. i think the merch that i am creating will work because it matches the concept of the album cover and poster and i feel like it will be easily identifiable. 

Overall what i'm creating is very different to what previously exists i still think that it could work because the existing products seem a bit plane and could do with a bit more life and colour, also i have noticed there isn't a large range of items that you can buy. here is an image of the existing merchandise.    

First colour tests

I decided that I wanted to try out screen printing the design for my poster. Before I went to screen print my image I thought that I would test out some colours to see what would work out as I hadn't really tested out any colours previously  and because ive never tried out more scandinavian colours before I thought this would help me out a lot. I looked at the research that I had done and selected a few colours inspired from their work, I also looked at some colours on a website called colour lover to help me out with palettes. These are the first two tests that I have created.

The colours in the first design looks a lot more like the colours that the artists that i have been looking at use but when I looked at it I think it looked a bit too barby ish. I do like the colours but im not too sure if they work that well. for the second image i decided to go with a more peachy, orange, autumnal colour for the main leaf but I kept the centre colour the same because I quite like that colour. I think I like the second design more because the colours work better together. Now my next task is to create similar colours in real life when I attempt to screen print my design. I am going to experiment with the colour of paper that I use for my final poster, I have got white, grey and brown A2 paper so I can experiment and see what works best with my design. I also have to decide if I want to include the character from the album cover and if so what colour I would like the character to be. 

 

Screen printing work shop

A few weeks ago my class had a screen printing workshop with our print technician it was very interesting and fun learning how to silk screen print. As my memory isn't too good there and theres a lot of steps it was hard for me to remember it all but I think the more I do it the easier it will get for me.  I created a print of David Cameron that Jade had perviously prepared for us to save time. 

First of all we had a safety brief just to make sure we knew how to keep safe, then we prepared the screen with light developing paint and left it to dry in the drying rack. Once that had dried we took the design that we wanted on the screen and put the design under the screen in a light developing box, you then close the lid to the box and vacuum out all of the air. You then turn on the UV light for around 30 seconds so the light sensitive paint will  burn the image into the screen. Then the screen gets cleaned in the jet wash to wash away the light sensitive paint then your image is ready to print. Before printing the edges of the screen should be taped off to stop any colour coming through the edges. After putting your paper down onto the vacuum board and putting your ink or paint onto the screen you have to use a squeegee kind of thing to drag the paint over the screen whilst pushing down and then your print should be done, I wasn't too good at this bit because i'm not used to holding the squeegee at the right angle but I should get used to it as i go. That is a basic description of how to screen print, there are more small details to it when you actually print but that is the idea of it. 

I think I will use this technique for my current project because the style works very well for what I want to achieve. Im not sure if it will work perfectly because I don't have much experience with screen printing but I will definitely try the technique out. Here is the print from the work shop  

Artist research: Elizabeth Moseng

Elizabeth Moseng is an illustrator from Norway that creates illustrations for all sorts of things from editorials to children's books. She has a very simplistic look to her style and her colour pallets are usually quite limited. Her work uses flat colours and shapes, her work looks very graphic but at the same time illustrative.
The simplicity of the flat colour and imagery is what I find most visually pleasing. The things that I am going to focus most on when looking at her work is the colours that she uses and the textures that she uses throughout her images as I am trying to learn what works best for my own images to get the right look that I want to achieve.

Artist research: Petra Börner

As I have been struggling to get to grips with the typical Scandinavian colour palettes used in a lot of Scandic design, I have decided to research more artists that use colours that I feel like I can work with more but still stick with the Scandinavian look and feel.

Petra Börner is a Swedish illustrator that studied fashion and takes a lot of inspiration from her great grandfather. After her completing her studies in London she started getting commissions from top design publications such as Elle and Vogue. Börner has collaborated with fashion houses and publications such as Louis Vuitton and Penguin books. 

Looking at her work the main thing that attracts me to it is the warm, bold colours and the theme of nature throughout her work. I think that I might be able to use colours similar to her work because I feel like they fit the slightly dark nature of the album that I am illustrating a cover for.     

Artist research Olle Eksell

Olle Eksell was a Swedish advertising illustrator that creates very fun brightly coloured illustrations. His work is full of crazy abstract geometry and strange characters, his work looks almost childish . I looked at his work to get inspiration and help with my colour palette, because iv'e never created anything with a more scandinavian feel I am finding it a bit tricky getting the colours right. He uses very bright almost sickly colours, very representative of the stereotypical scandinavian design style. I am going to try out using similar colours to him and see how it works as i've never tried anything like this out before. Here are a few images that I will be looking as for inspiration. 

Poster thumbnails

I have sketched up some thumbnails for the design of my poster. I like both of the ideas but I think i'm leaning more towards the second option because the composition is more interesting than the first one. If I do go ahead with the second design I will have to work out if it needs text and if so where the text should go to make it look good and evenly balanced. I plan on screen printing my A2 poster to give it more of a scandinavian look and feel to it as a lot of illustrations from that part of the world look screen printed. This might be quite a task for me as I don't have much experience with screen printing but I know the basics and i'm up for the challenge of it. My next step is to decide on the colours and start doing test prints to see how it will look. Here are my initial thumbnails 

Editorial sketch

For my editorial design I decided to focus on an image that would go into a music magazine as I can't imagine Agnes Obel in a normal or fashion magazine as her music is more instrumental based rather than image based. For this I thought I should include her instruments and I wanted to link them to the album cover and poster so I decided to include the same style leaves swirling around them. 

I drew a violin as they play a predominant part in most of her music and added the leaves around it. I will work over this image to refine it and when I have decided on colours I will proceed to colour the image. This is the sketch that I have at the moment. 

Merchandise: Product design

For my merchandise I have decided to create a cushion. I decided this after thinking about what the target audience might like to receive or purchase, I got the idea of creating a cushion so the listener can be comfortable whilst listening to the music. I want to make the cushion represent the leaves on the front of the album cover so it is clear that the product goes with the rest of the products in the box set. 

I have got some plain white cotton material that I plan to screen print the design onto for the front of the cushion. I have got a different colour for the back, the back colour will match the colour of the veins of the leaf design. I also plan on adding some decorative pom pom fringing as I feel this adds a more Scandinavian design feel to the product. I also will have wading on the back of the design and I will sow around the veins of the leaves to make the cushion more textured and interesting.  I plan on having a zip fastening but I might change my mind and create the cushion with no opening. I have drew up my design and added some notes, I have also bought the materials so I am ready to make the product straight away. The next step will be to work out the dimensions that I want the cushion to be, and maybe make a small prototype. Then get on with screen printing my material and assembling the final product.

Artist research: Anders Arhoj

Anders Arhoj owns Arhoj studios in Copenhagen, Denmark. It is an interior and design studio. The studio's work is based on scandinavian simplicity with an essence of Japanese influence. They create unique cute home wears as well as art prints and a whole range of other products. 

The style of this art is very blocky and doesn't use lines the colours are very traditional and give a bit of a retro but at the same time contemporary feel. I will use this style of not using any lines to experiment and see how it looks with my design. 

The image below is one of my favourites because of the unique but very scandinavian colours that have been used.  I also think that the way some building have been drawn using only line work, works really well.  

This is an ornament that the studio produces i love how unique and cute the item is. I think the way they have left the bottom of the ornament bare works so well because the design is pretty simple and it adds a more interesting look to it.  

  

Artist research: Sanna Annukka

Scandinavian illustration often has a very graphic design look to it, in the way that the shapes and colours make up the images. They are usually very bold with bright colours and often give a screen printed look. This can be clearly be seen in Sanna Annukka's work. Sanna Annukka was born in Brighton to a finish mother and spent a lot of her childhood in Finland she is inspired by the magical quality of this part of the world. She designs for the Finnish brand called Marimekko and creates her own silk screen prints. 

Her work is made up of different descriptive shapes that when put together create beautiful images. They are very bold and striking but if you look closer the image is made up of very detailed small patterns and lines. I am going to experiment and see if I can make my design a bit more simplistic so that it will work with this style of silk screen illustration. 

The thing I think works best in the image below is the leaf style patterns within the hills I think it is really effective and the pattern gives a more detailed look to the image. This will work really well within the leaves on my design.  

This illustrator also created products that are for sale on her website. She creates imaged then prints them onto wood shaped to fit the image. I think this looks really effective as the simplicity of the item works really well with the design printed onto it. 

her illustrations are used and printed onto many different products such as mugs, fabrics and other home wears her designs work really well against the white backgrounds of the products. I don't think my design will have a white background but its something to consider.

Artist research: Trove Jansson

Trove Jansson is a Finnish Illustrator that has created many different works of art throughout her lifetime, but she is best known for the much loved children's TV animation Moomin that is still popular today. Moomin started off as a weekly newspaper comic strip for adults in London in 1954 and in 1955 the strip started to be published across the Nordic papers. Creating a strip every single day of the week became stressful so her brother eventually took over until it ended

The comic strip then got turned into a TV animated series in 1990 based off Troves comic strips and books, about a troll that lived in moominvalley. A lot of the scenery and colours used in the animation is based off and inspired by her homeland of Finland. The illustration style and colours that are used are very typical of the nordic illustration style. The look of the illustrations give a really nice happy nostalgic feel. The characters are simply coloured with block colours, this is how i usually like to colour my images so looking at these illustrations will help me with the way I use colour within my illustration for my CD cover. 

Here is a video of the opening scene from moomin

As in more recent years moomin has became more popular the merchandise that is made for the moomin series has been updated with a more modern nordic feel to it. The characters and imagery have all been kept the same but with an update in design placement and colour pallet. This is really good to see how one thing can grow and develop in to something new over the years. I think the update has worked really well and successful as the products seem to be very popular amongst fans and collectors as there is an extensive range of things available to buy. I really love the modern nordic illustrative feel they have to them, I feel as though it is very representative of where they are from. 

Moomin Candle Holder 2014

Moomin bed cover

Poster research

As we have to create a poster for this brief I decided to look at a verity of different music posters to see what kind of styles and layouts I think work best. Whilst looking at music posters I realised that there were two different types of posters that are made for artists, posters that advertise the album/concerts and posters that fans would buy for their wall. Im not sure what kind of poster we have to create but for now I will research both types. Looking at these posters will give me more ideas and inspiration for creating my own poster for the Agnes Obel album Aventine.

Whilst searching for music posters I came across some Bombay bicycle club posters that advertise their concerts. Most if not all of their album art is designed by illustrator Katie Scott, Her work has a lovely delicate colour and line quality to it i think it works really well for the bands image. The art used on their albums and posters gives a very vintage vibe, they look although they are drawn in the style of old medical and science drawings. This style although it reflects times gone by is also very current and contemporary now as this style is starting to come into illustration more often.

 I have always loved their illustrated album covers so it was really interesting to see how the album designs translated onto posters. The thing I like most about this poster is the composition, I think because the image us central it has a really clear focal point. I also like how although it is attention grabbing the image is still really subtle and simple. I will experiment and try out a similar composition to this and see how it works with my poster design.

The Poster below is a Biffy Clyro poster advertising tour dates. The things that I think work best are the limited colours and the fact that it looks screen printed. I really like the navy blue on the yellow background as I feel that it makes the imagery really stand out, I also think that the illustrative typography for the bands name gives the poster a really quirky unique look and feel. The design and imagery matches the band well as they have very unique strange lyrics about all different things. I am thinking about designing my poster for screen printing as I really love the look and feel of a screen printed image. I also feel like if the poster is part of a limited edition box set then it will be nicer to have a screen printed poster rather than a run of the mill printed poster.  

Overall I think that the sound and image of the musician or band is very representative in their poster designs. I will aim to get across the sound and feel of the artists music in my poster. And I now know that i'd like to create a screen printed poster for my final design.