OUGD406 - Design is about doing - Secret 7"

The secret 7 brief was one of my favorite briefs we did all year, I liked it because it was a live brief with the possibility of actually winning something or having your work acknowledged, plus it was for a good cause. The idea behind it is you are given several music artists to choose from which were, Elton John, Haim, Public Enemy, Nick Drake, Nas, Laura Marling and Jessie Ware. From those artists they had one song each that you had to create a 7" vinyl sleeve for. 

The rules were that you couldn't inclue the artists name or track on the sleeve because the idea behind it was that people would come a buy the records without them knowing, purely choosing them on how they looked. 
After listening to the songs of each artist I decided to select Nas as the one I would design a sleeve for, I didn't particularly like the song but I felt there was a lot of potential ideas I could use from it being Nas.

Through my initial research I felt I wanted to go down the route of drawing Nas's tattoos as he has quite a few pretty interesting ones including one saying Gods son written across his chest. I also looked into his background as a rap artist, where he grew up and any significant moments in his life. I also looked at his past album and LP covers to gauge an idea of what sort of stuff fitted with his music.

In the end I decided to go along the route of his tattoos, specifically focusing on his Gods son tattoo.  I drew up a diagram representing all the things I knew about him that I thought I could use in my initial sketches.

I started by drawing out some thumbnails including the god son tattoo idea and the Queens bridge where he grew up as I thought these could possibly work.

I liked the Idea how he thought to some extent he was gods son considering he got it tattooed across his belly. I thought this showed to me an over inflated ego, in his time Nas has made loads of good songs and is a well respected rapper, as of late though his productions have been pretty off the mark. I thought  I could use this against him considering I didn't particularly like the track, so I wanted to take the piss out of him a little bit. I thought about the actual meaning of Gods son which is jesus and saw that I could use this to relate back to Nas considering also that he is a christian. 

These were some of my initial drawings before I started drawing jesus, I thought about maybe drawing Nas in a cartoon style.

His song I chose was called the godfather so I looked to the film for some inspiration and even thought about even incorporating the classic Godfather logo into my design. 

I eventually stuck with drawing jesus but initially I couldn't figure out what sort of style to draw it in, I tried a very loose style taking inspiration from some of David Shrigley's work. I tried several variations eventually going with a more biblical style I felt looked more how a depiction of Jesus should look.

I used different quality of lines to make the picture more interesting to the eye, I also added a little speech mark to add a little humour to the drawing. 

After I scanned the image in I could play about with it and see what colours worked best, I tried initially to overlay some colour behind it I felt it worked to an extent but didn't really have any relevance to it.  

I tried other block colours loosely following the idea of a stain glass window, I didn't particularly like the outcome as I felt the black was a bit to over powering, I tried the white back ground and white lines but I felt the image lost its impact. 

The final colour variation I tried was a more natural selection, I wanted to keep the black background because I didn't feel white worked very well.

I felt that the image looked its best at its simplest with just a black and white variation. This was the final image I ended up submitting. 
As this was a competition you have to submit your work online and people vote your image for a chance for your work to be displayed in the gallery. There is two different selection processes, the peoples choice and chosen by the competition. I got an email a few weeks after entering saying I was going to have my work displayed in the gallery which was a brilliant surprise. Sadly I couldn't go down to London to see the exhibition but I have seen images online.

Every winner of the competition gets a sleeve from the event this is the one they sent me.