Album Art WorkDigipak ideas

Avenged Sevenfold’s Death bat

My drawing of my groups interpretation of the Death bat.

Album Art WorkWhen my group decided to do Avenged Sevenfold’s Nightmare we looked at what Avenged Sevenfold do to promote themselves to gain recognition and one thing we found that Avenged always use is the Death bat.I then took on the role of drawing the album art work as the gothic skeleton art really appealed to me and I felt it would look a lot better and the audience would appreciate it more if I actually took the time and effort to try and replicate the well known symbol of Avenged Sevenfold. My group agreed that we would use my drawn images on the front cover of the album and within the Digipak, this way people will recognise that we have done Avenged Sevenfold for our coursework.However, my group decided that I should include a little twist on the death bat. The twist was to include the Joker’s (from Batman) iconic make-up on the death bat because we have planned to use this make-up on actors in our music video as the song is called nightmare, the nightmare within our song is being chased by these clown-like figures. Here we have used intertextual reference to the batman film. Therefore it seemed highly logical to include this make-up on the death bat as it then became our own idea and art as no one else has an image like this. We also did this because we didn't want to completely copy the bands symbol as it is our work we wanted to make it our own whilst also representing the band we have chosen.

I then scanned the drawn image and started to apply effects to it through Photoshop to make it look less like a pencil drawing and mainly just to make the lines darker and more defined. I did this by using the magnetic lasso tool and going round each individual line and then using the fill option to apply the black on to the line.This has been rather time consuming although the professional quality and the great look it has given has definitely paid off as we now have our very own album art work for our album.

Poster

Original drawing

After digital manipulation

I then took on the role to draw another design for the poster and possibly to include in the digipak if needs be. The drawing was in pencil, therefore we had to scan if and digitally manipulate it to make it look as if it had been done on the computer. We again felt that drawing the artwork ourselves was important as we can manipulate the designs to suit our own ideas for our album artwork.

Digipak draft

The image in the previous slide is an idea of what we want our Digipak to look like. We plan to film in the woods as we want to use the element of earth within our video and that feel of nature because from our research we have found a lot of rock bands film in woods and forests. It seems like a good idea to have images of the woods in the Digipak as we can manipulate the lighting to make it look dark and scary to fit in with the rock genre whilst complying with the earth element effect.We aim to include an image of the band in the woods in the middle of the digipak purely for group recognition and to promote the band as we found this is a popular convention with bands' Digipaks. The two images would be on either end of the Digipak and they will include two CDs. On the front of the discs there will be the image of the plain dark forest that we plan to film in. However when you remove the CD there will be Joker faced nightmares hiding behind and around the trees. We thought this would be extremely effected as the buyer will not expect to see these figures hiding behind the disc and we hope that the viewer will appreciate the detail and thought behind this as they themselves are revealing these nightmares.