During my stay at ESAD (Escola Superior de Artes e Design), we were tasked to pick a song from a musician, take key points of the lyrics and make a cover and back cover art for a vinyl album and the vinyl's center label, I picked "I'm Sorry" from Joyner Lucas, this was my process:
Joyner Lucas' singles artwork examples
To start, our teacher asked us to explain the reason of our song choice and artist, I dared to say that "this song represented much more than just the artist's experience with mental health issues, it gave light to a matter that everyone seems to forget just because their lives are in a good spot at the moment, dismissing everyone around them, this song is explicit and holds nothing back in terms of immersion, I know a little too well what it's like to lose someone you care for and I've seen a lot of cases like the one mentioned on the song so this hits close to home, that's why I picked this song..."
For the next part I'm going to be tackling the keywords from a snippet of the lyrics and in order to not crowd the page with too much text I ask that you read the lyrics here: https://genius.com/Joyner-lucas-im-sorry-lyrics
With all of these keywords, I wanted to make an illustration where there was a personification of depression attached to the person, feeling like it's dragging them down, a "monster" of some sorts, so I got to sketching:
The initial sketch has our character in the typical hoodie almost covering their face and a monster attached to its back feeling like a personality dissociation through depression of the character, the monster design I wanted to go with a Marvel's Venom kind of approach but this was the initial idea eventually turning into this:
Spread Album Illustration
Front Cover Illustration
Back Cover Illustration
The result is much clearer now with the monster build being a lot for concise and for the label I decided to make like a goo and clouds going around it:
Vinyl CD Label
And then we had to make mockups:
Final Front, label and Back Cover of the Album Art Mockups
Never in my life I thought I'd have such a task as an assignment, in the end these projects were even printed out and made as actual vinyl album covers in an exhibition!
