L6 2D Design pupils have been working on an album cover project since the start of Michaelmas term, culminating in an exhibition in the School's Crypt Gallery. In this blog, L6 pupil Betsy writes about her experience of the project and what it was like to have her work on display.
"At the beginning of the year, we were introduced to our first A-Level project for 2D: we were to produce a re-designed album cover for an artist of our choice. What was the catch? We had to choose albums from a specific decade. For those taking Photography, our choices were the 1950s, 70s or 90s. For those doing Graphic Design, they could choose the 1960s, 1980s or the 2000s. Initially, I found the project extremely difficult to get stuck into, having the decades I could choose from being limited meant that a lot of my initial ideas wouldn’t work, but after flitting through several ideas for a few weeks I finally decided on the 1990s. My next issue was which artist to choose. My knowledge of the 90s was severely lacking so I spent around a week researching pop culture, popular music tracks and main events that took place within that decade. I found myself becoming more interested in rave culture and the laws that were passed during those 10 years that limited the amount of “intense” raving that could take place. I decided that I didn’t want to choose a ‘classic’ 90s icon, such as The Spice Girls or Britney Spears, and my research on rave culture led me to discover a band entitled ‘Massive Attack’.
It was their cover art that truly piqued my interest, clearly portraying their thoughts on the police and the new laws being passed surrounding a large percentage of their fan base. After researching the band for some time, I discovered rumours that the lead singer, Del Naja, is rumoured to be Banksy; this led me to research Banksy more and finally creating my idea for my photoshoot. I wanted to emanate classic Banksy art, using stencils and limited colour palettes. Taking inspiration from the culture of the 90s, people becoming more comfortable with expressing themselves and their sexuality, and Banksy’s artwork, particularly his ‘Girl with Balloon’ image, I got the idea for the initial project. I incorporated graphic liner with my artwork, after editing my images to look like stencilled black and white images with a pop of red, I graffitied over my work. The graphic liner spurred me on to experiment with solely graphical work, creating outlines of the band members, using psychedelic colours and concepts to create a final poster design. Having the decades limited meant that I created work that was different to my previous projects, and I loved being able to experiment with different media, which I had also never done before.
The experience of having our work on display in the Crypt Gallery was rather surreal but it was also extremely rewarding. Being able to see the final products of our hard work for others to view was amazing and being able to see what others had created with the same title was incredibly interesting. The experience was really good fun, and I can’t wait to do things like it again in the future."