CD Cover

Artist Statement

For my first assignment I chose to do a CD cover. The reason I chose this was simply because I love music. Not only do I love music, but I love CDs. Even with downloading and file sharing, I’ve always found it more exciting to go into a store and buy a physical CD. I love looking at the album artwork, the lyrics and all the extra stuff that musicians put into their albums. As I got started on the assignment, I had no idea what I was going to do. I looked through my pictures and many different websites for inspiration. I finally found a picture that I liked and decided to use it. I was going to create a band and design a CD cover based on a few things I found online. As soon as I got started, I got really into it. However, I discovered that when using an image—that was not solid as my background, it was hard to find fonts and colours that really stood out. I tried playing around with saturation and a few other blending techniques, but I never got the effect I wanted.

The next day I lay on my bed waiting for inspiration to hit me. Suddenly I realized something so obvious. I have a love for dream catchers. I looked at the massive one hanging on my wall and then shifted my eyes to the tiny one attached to my key chain. Now, I didn’t know exactly what to do, but I knew if I incorporated something I loved, that this would be easier. I opened up google and searched ‘Dreamcatchers’. I then began creating my own dream catcher. I decided I probably needed a band name so I opened up my iTunes. I typed ‘dream’ and found Bad Dream by This Century. How had I not thought of this earlier? Not only do I love this song and band, but it works perfectly with my design idea. 

Next I went onto www.colourlovers.com. I decided my target audience would be teen girls around my age—since most of my friends that like This Century fit this description. Young, Girls and Pop/Rock music made me think of bright colours. I found a few colour palettes that worked and got drawing. Drawing feathers that don’t look like spiders can get quite tricky. I’ve never been an amazing drawer so tracing often helped me in this assignment. It was fun to work with many different colours. I chose a dark background to help the dream catcher—the main piece, stick out. The fonts and colours I chose were ones I believed were complimentary to the dark background colour and overall theme of my piece. I also tried to align my wording so it looked more uniform. In the end I really played around with colours, fonts, placement and blending. In the end I think I achieved my goal of a colourful piece that matches my opinion of the band—This Century.  


Benefits of Class Crit.


I enjoyed presenting my piece to the class. It feels really nice to hear feedback about what was both good and bad about my own work. The good stuff is really re-assuring. It gives me confidence. After looking at your own piece for so long, sometimes one can grow tired of it—As I did with mine. I really liked what I created, but after a while it just looked the same, ya know? So hearing from the class helped me see my piece in a new way. I saw things I achieved and things I could have improved on. The entire session really just taught me to keep going. If I think there's something wrong, or something's missing in my piece, there probably is. Also, it made me more comfortable with sharing something I've produced. I didn't really show anyone what I was working on until it was does (besides my parents of course) But I think I could have benefitted from showing it to some people in the same class/program as me, hear their feedback & make improvements to my piece. In conclusion, I really enjoyed seeing other peoples hard work & sharing mine with them. After working on something for such a long time, it's really rewarding to share it.