Project: Album Cover | Design Movement
Student Project Statement
This album cover and design movement project was an assignment to have us learn more about a specific art movement and help us learn to study and evaluate a designer’s work. It also helped us become aware of other styles. This assignment had us recreate/imitate an artist’s style and by copying another piece of artwork we constantly compare our work to theirs facilitating a deeper self-understanding.
I chose Breaking Benjamin as my band and the dada movement as my design movement. I specifically chose John Heartfield as the artist whose piece I would be recreating. While reviewing my band’s albums and my artists’ works, I found the similarities between Breaking Benjamin’s original artwork for the album and John Heartfield’s piece were striking. I approached the concept with the idea that Phobia should be represented literally through the cover using the photomontage style. I decided to use a more realistic blending of photos, rather than a cut-and-paste style, in order to keep the piece more modern in nature while keeping its ties to the photomontage style.
I decided to imitate Heartfield’s work in order to keep true to the album while also keeping true to the artist. I started with the dagger and wrapped my phobia focus around the blade instead of having it be impaled. I did this to create a larger impact with the phobia imagery. I thought a living creature would create a stronger impact than a dead one. After creating the spiders and the dagger I had a difficult time finding out what my background would be. The piece looked unfinished as it was, but I was able to come to the idea of spiderwebs as it would also help drive home the idea of phobia. I also had small spiders descending on webs around the central spider to represent the feathers that existed in Heartfield’s work.
