Evaluation

Completed video

Magazine advert

After finishing my single artwork, I moved onto creating an advert which would be featured in a magazine advertising the single.
I wanted to keep the magazine advert related to the cover, but I also felt that it was a chance to link the original album to the new single. Therefore, I decided to stick with the urban look but with a feel similar to the original album artwork, in that certain colours and texts hold a slightly regal feel.
When looking for some inspirational pieces, I found myself trying different searches into Google to bring up some advert ideas. I found myself Googling 'music magazine poster', which is when I got my idea.
I wanted to keep the idea simple so that the message was put across swiftly, which is what adverts are generally meant to do. Therefore, I kept the poster fairly plain and simple, which also kept in line with the raw feel I went for with my single artwork. To do this, I used a rough brick wall as the backdrop, and roughed the paper edges using downloaded grunge brushes as an eraser. I also took time to choose my font carefully, so that it would be a relatively formal font which had been 'grunged' up. I created a faded look on the paper by turning the opacity down on most layers, so that everything layered into each other nicely. Below is the finished product.

Completed single artwork piece

I am pleased with the raw London look I have achieved with my single cover. The Skints are nothing but what they are, and don't pretend to be anything more. I feel this base feel has come through in my single artwork designs.

Single artwork back

After careful choosing and peer research, I decided to stick with my 3rd design of the single cover, which showed The Skints band name and single name on the London street sign post. Following this theme, I decided it would be an interesting idea to different kind of London street sign to incorporate the 3 track names for the single. Below is the original image I begun with.

The first thing to do was edit out the names. By using the clone stamp tool in Photoshop, this was nice and easy to do. I noticed the font was close to Times New Roman, so I colour picked the original text, and played with some blending options to make the text look realistic. Originally I expected to do the bevel option, but this didn't bring out the effect I had hoped, so I used a close drop shadow and changed the opacity of the text layers to blend into the background.

Next I decided I didn't like the building on the left, so I cloned that out. After finishing touches to make it look realistic, such as bar codes and copyrights, I finished with the image below. 

Single artwork designs

Below are three cover designs that I conjured up by using iconic features I had decided that I would attempt to incorporate previously.

Single artwork creation process - 2

As a completely different idea from the other, I decided to bring an edit to a real-world image which would draw upon urban roots. By starting off with a London street sign, by patching over the original text using the colour picker and then finding the correct font which matched the original text, I reinvented what was written on the street sign. The only difficult part of making this was adjusting the proportions of the text to make them fit in with the angle of the photography. However, as I feel I am adept in Photoshop, this did not take long to master.
This image includes the single title of "Born in East London", which is a lyric from the song 'Up Against The Wall'. This works both ways - 'Born in East London' is linked to the image by using the postcode E4, which anyone who knows much about London will know that it is the postcode for the general area. After a small amount of research, I narrowed down E postcodes to E4, which I believe is where The Skints' band members were raised. In a more literal sense, this sign is 'Up Against The Wall'. The black bars frame the sign, which focuses the concentration onto the band. The final image is below.