For this brief, we were given three pre-requisites to help come up with our album covers.
My project involves a brother and sister hip hop duo that also work as cartoonists.
Approaching this, I immediately had an artist in mind as a reference. Tobi Lou is a hip hop/rap artist that’s based his work with a lot of animation. It has a great appeal as most cartoons currently is written with a fluid narrative that appeals to a broad range of ages. For instance, Adventure Time –a cartoon series who's art style Tobi Lou borrows in one of his music videos– official demographic is targeted for young children ages 11-15, however, there is a wider audience within the 16-30 age range that finds interest in the show as well. Therefore, I felt that basing the album cover with a mixed element of both cartoon-style portraits in a real-life setting/background is what I would like to achieve.
Adventure Time vs. Tobi Lou (Art Style Comparison)
Additionally, I did some research on other artists who had graphic covers and went over to Sister Ray. I found a few that featured two artists on the album so I can get references for composition. The artists I looked at were Sincerely the P, MF Doom, Genius/GZA and Czarface. I started with MF Doom because I knew from personal interest that all his covers were graphic and found the rest of the artists right after.
(From left to right) Genius/GZA, Sincerely the P, Czarface, MF Doom, Tobi Lou
Looking at the album covers, I'm drifting towards Tobi Lou and Sincerely the P's albums because it's simple. I like the positioning of the characters as it gives the viewer a hint at their relationship with each other.
Currently, I'm still in the middle of searching for the models to act as my brother-sister duo, however, I'm already in contact with a graphic artist who's art style matches Tobi Lou's and my collaboration with them will be confirmed soon. I'm hoping to work with them by the third week.
This week I'll be planning and working on the pre-production of the video aspect of the brief. So far I'm looking into doing a before and after of the cartoonists in their human form and then their music personas as cartoons. However, this all depends on the availability of the graphic designer.
