OUAN503 - Secret 7" - Chvrches, Clearest Blue

Clearest Blue by Chvrches was the first track listed on the track list of the Secret 7" site. It made sense that I attempted this one first because of this, combined with the relatively open nature of the title. Furthermore this was one of the only tracks that I had previously heard of, unlike a couple of the others on the list. The first step for anything like this for me is writing down all the ideas that come to mind to see if anything that I think up could work in the context of the brief. For this, I was trying to think up of words, phrases, and imagery that could be associated or interpreted in conjunction with the track title; 'Clearest Blue'. I was trying to be careful however, I knew that I didn't want to be too literal with the artwork and just illustrate the title of the track, similar to other record sleeves I looked at, a lot of the time they were associated with lyrics or the bands imagery as a whole, which I find much more interesting and engaging than simply creating an image to accompany the title of the track.

Like I previously mentioned, my main focus with this brief in particular was to experiment with illustration and seize the opportunity to explore new ways of working in 2D, or even revisiting traditional methods that I haven't had been able to use as frequently in the past few months. As this was my first sleeve out of the seven that I was planning on doing I wanted to start with something I was a little more comfortable and refined on doing so I chose to produce this one digitally in Photoshop using a mixture of textures, paintbrushes and if it needed photographs in order to photo bash certain objects, colours, shapes or textures. This was subject to the type of scene I was creating though, and I hadn't nailed down anything in particular at this stage that I wanted to do. To counter the creative block in terms of ideas I decided to just get something down on the canvas regardless of it being relevant or the route I wanted to take. The chances are based on my past experience that it would develop into a worthy idea that I could then take forward. Whilst I was working and choosing colours I had the works Clearest Blue in my head, and tried to not stray too far from this when working. One of my favourite types of natural lighting is the kind of haziness that can be seen over a city either early in the morning or as the sun is setting, essentially when the sun is low in the sky and the tall buildings and blocking some of the light. I suppose I'm ultimately describing golden hour with an added element of fog. But as I started to work on colours and produce lines on the canvas that resembled contrails, it's this time of day that I was reminded of. I wanted the design to be simple, easy to read and atmospheric. I spent some time experimenting with shapes and skylines as well blending modes on the different layers when layering whole layers of colours and painted lines to achieve a certain level of depth and the correct lighting that I had in mind. I thought quite a lot about type of composition I was creating and how to convey this type of lighting, potentially through buildings from street level or even from the top of a building amongst the city. Ultimately, I wanted the sky to be the focus of the image so I chose to make that take up the majority of the canvas. The things that I liked about this design when I had finished was the choice of colours in the sky, combined with the clouds and the refraction of sun through them giving quite an atmospheric feel overall. There are certain elements I definitely feel like could have been stronger however. Looking back, there could have been a little more detail put into the image, as there seems to be a contrast between the semi realistic sky and the lack of detail in the foreground buildings, which let the image down slightly I think. Thinking about the concept and idea behind the image I do feel like there was a lot more that could have been done with this particular track, but with the amount of different designs that could have been used for this brief it's easy to say what could have been produced. I also learnt a little about colours and the differences between CMYK and RGB. I spoke to Mike about converting the RGB image into CMYK as this was a requirement of the brief but I had only realised after I had nearly finished. We spoke about the different and that unfortunately due to CMYK containing about 4 million colours and RBG containing about 16 million there was going to be some loss of colour when converting to CMYK. I went and spoke to James in the digital printing room and he informed me that when converting to CMYK from RBG to do it through the 'convert to profile' function in Photoshop rather than converting directly to CMYK. I did this, and luckily there was hardly any noticeable difference between the two, so I learnt the importance of producing work in the correct colour mode for a brief through this accident, which I was lucky enough to be able to rectify.

In summary I liked the image I made for this track under the Secret 7" brief, however I think given more time and due to my inexperience tackling briefs I may have played it quite safe when it came down to the idea and the production of the image. I will try to make sure that I experiment further with other images to make sure that I'm using the 2D format to its maximum potential and hopefully learning about how to work in this way too.

Chvrches - Clearest Blue