OUAN503 - Secret 7" - John Lennon, Imagine

In my mind the words 'Imagine' and 'Dream' had similar connotations, so when I read these track titles I was immediately away I didn't want to repeat a similar design for both of them. Not necessarily form an idea perspective but definitely form a visual stand point. I wanted to include an element of fantasy in this sleeve, the idea I had was to have a child fishing in a pond contained within a forest environment. I feel like forests have a natural feeling of enchantment to them, especially in the context of a fantastical world with fantasy elements included.

The design started off as two separate components, as I wanted quite sure about the composition or how the character was going to fit into the environment itself. Again, this was a combination of a traditional effort using pencil and marker, with Photoshop to again refine the image and add colour with lighting that suits the theme and give the image the element of fantasy that it would be missing at this stage. Once the character was drawn, I created a square in my sketchbook before using reference photographs to draw a rough forest environment. I went round the details of the environment using a blank marker, giving the image definition that when scanned in would be easy to work over with the crisp black lines, as oppose to rough pencil marks that would have been harder to work with. After this I used the multiply blending option on a layer above the drawing to add colour. The colours were fairly realistic but I made sure to keep it a relatively dull colour scheme, of dark greens and blues. This gave the image a darker more serious tone as oppose to using light greens which wouldn't have worked as well, and made the image look less serious in its appearance. The character was then coloured and scanned in the same way that the environment was and placed into the scene. I resized the character so his fishing rod fit nicely into the image. The final stage was the colour correction stage where reds were over laid in order to create a certain ambience. I had an idea at this stage to add fireflies as if they were hovering over the pond that was being fished in, this was made easier by combining Photoshop brushes and overlaying photographs of embers and fire. This brought the image up to a finished stage.

Overall, this image worked okay in terms of representing the fantasy elements that I wanted it to. In terms of the drawing style however, it isn't a style that I would normally draw in and ultimately it felt a bit off for me. I liked the way the colours worked out in the end but I think I would have spent more time on it if I had more time making sure it was more realistic and detailed. I also would have added in an art nouveau style possibly, because I think the fantastical elements would have worked well in this historical art style.

John Lennon - Imagine