OUAN503 - Secret 7" - The Jam, Art School

Of the seven sleeves that were available to work on this was the last of the seven I attempted. I decided to do something relatively simple and straight forward as the deadline for the brief was getting worryingly close. I was hoping that a simple straight forward idea would do well as oppose to the large amounts of thinking and research I've been putting into some the others.

I had the initial idea of illustrating something recognisable as something a school child would do, such as a playground game or a paper aeroplane for example. Stemming from this I decided to do a paper boat floating on the surface of a river with some ripples as if it was being blown across the water. This design was actually the quickest one to do as like I said I wanted it to be simple and straight forward. I did spend some time however painting the paper boat as it was difficult to capture the shadows on the paper, a challenge but I think I got there in the end and the illusion of light and shadows on the paper boat worked quite well in the end. I think what made it work visually was being quite subtle with the colour change between light and shadow. Furthermore, I haven't really had the opportunity or chance to paint a reflection digitally before so this was a small challenge for me, although I essentially used the same technique as painting shadows and playing with opacity. In hindsight I wish I had given it a ripple effect to compliment the painted water ripples and I think that would have added a lot to the image in terms of attention to detail and the physicality of certain details. The colour scheme came fairly naturally, the final image in my opinion would have benefited from an even greener tint though, in order to convey the typical green algae covered pond water. Thinking about this now, it would have been fun to add surface algae and lily pads in the actual image as the area around the paper boat. When creating this image I really enjoyed painting the ripples and experimenting with the different brushes, some softer edged brushes and some harder round brushes. The combination of the two gave for quite an interesting effect and after a couple of attempts I managed to paint them to a point I was happy with. Another hard aspect of this was painting the ripples in the correct plane so that they were parallel with the surface of the water and the bottom of the paper boat. It was easy to spot when everything was drawn in the correct plane, and I was quite happy with the effects. Textures were quite important in this image too, however I think more textures could have been added in order to improve the visual appeal of the water. After this, I made the decision not to over complicate the image, especially with textures that could look out of place if various areas of the image were of a lot higher detail than others.

After I had completed this design I had a full set of seven images to submit to the competition brief. I showed the designs to some friends and I was surprised at the ones they liked but I suppose in a way it's good that the majority of my designs have some redeeming qualities that people like and can engage with. I was quite happy with this design despite how simple it was and think it was a good exercise in working quickly and other technical aspects of drawing and illustration as a whole.

The Jam - Art School