OUGD 406 - Studio Brief 1

I am going to start this project by looking at existing Laura Marling album covers and artworks to get a feel of how they have been interpreted in the past. I have collected a few different album artworks, including artwork created for the song 'The Beast' which is the song that I shall be interpreting.

These are examples of design work created for the album 'A Create I Don't Know' and the song 'The Beast'. I like the way in which they are very expressive and dark, successfully representing the dark and melancholic side of the album. They all depict a woman, or a child, and the 'beast'; the beast is often depicted as being a human with some form of animal like head. The use of block colour and heavy strokes in conjunction with light, delicate lines effectively emphasises the difference between the woman and the beast. It also adds to this foreboding feeling that you get from the song, the compositions of the designs seeming as though the woman is in some sort of struggle or danger reinforcing this. I then went on to look at some other album artwork created for various other Laura Marling tracks and albums.

 

  

I also wanted to look at the different ways in which Laura Marling has been presented and portrayed by the media. To do so, I gathered and looked at some examples of publications that she has featured in. I think it is very interesting to see how differently she has been portrayed on different magazines.

 For 'The New Review' magazine, where she has been called 'The New Queen of Folk', she is portrayed as being very happy and relaxed. The background is a calming blue colour and very empty and open. This vibe, however, is not given from the way in which she has been displayed on the 'NME' magazine. Here, she is smoking a cigarette and is standing in a much more aggressive manner. The background is poorly lit and quite dark, giving this foreboding feeling that I saw in some of the artwork made for her.

 This cover portrays her differently again, making her seem much more vulnerable, fragile and delicate. I think these different takes are all very valid and each side of her can be seen within different songs of her. I will look into this idea when creating my own design in order to portray how I feel she comes across.

  

This book, 'The Rebel Angels' by Robertson Davies is what inspired Marling to sing about some of the things that she has. I think this cover says a lot about the book and of Marling herself. It appears to be about beasts and demons which very much the main character within her song 'The Beast'.

 This is a design created by Jules Magistry for Laura Marling. It portrays a much more light-hearted take on Laura Marling and her songs whilst still including the beast like characters. Putting this slightly more positive side on her songs is something I think I will try to do within my own designs, not making it come across as too melancholic and dark.

I then looked at some of the winners of last year's Secret 7 competition to get some sort of an idea the kind of designs that won. I feel that this may help a lot in the decisions I make when creating my own interpretations.

I think that these all seem to be very digital based designs which may be something that I have to think about when designing; using digital means of design means my final outcome will look much more professional and clean.

I then produced a series of thumbnails to represent my ideas and hopefully help to produce some more ideas. I liked the idea of using flowers within my design as I feel this is a strong symbol in representing the folk style music that Laura Marling is associated with. When looking around at flowers and their links to music I came across this design for 'Florence and the Machine'. It consists of photographs of flowers behind simple, white hand-rendered text. I thought that this looked very aesthetically pleasing and simple. However, because I can't use text within my design I would need to create simple shapes and images to use over the top of my photographs. I decided that my best bet was to try creating simple icon like designs of various aspects of Laura Marling, the song 'The Beast' and folk music as a whole.

 

I came across this design when searching for other examples of my idea. Although it is not exactly the same as what I am planning, it still incorporates the idea of using photography behind simple white lines. For the imagery in the background, as it is not the right time of year for me to go out and take photographs of flowers, I shall have to use photographs that I already have, luckily I have many existing photographs of my own to choose from. This is going to be a reference point that I shall use when creating my own designs.

Now that I had decided on an idea that I felt was going to work successfully in visually representing Laura Marling's 'The Beast', I started to collect some images to use as reference when creating my icons. I quickly gathered some images from Google to refer to as they didn't need to be good quality; I was only using the images to make sure I knew how the actual thing really looked. Each image relates to either my interpretation of Laura Marling, the lyrics from 'The Beast' or is a visual link to the folk style of music.