submission

For this project I was given a random album title, band name and genre to create a 12 x 12 x 12 3D album cover for. My band is Shallow Hipsters, the album is Killer Cube and the genre is Surf Guitar. To the right are my initial notes from the briefing. The first thing I did was to start looking at bands that fit in the genre of surf guitar/rock and what better place to start than The Beach Boys. I looked at their album covers at work and started to identify common traits in them.

After having a look online too, I quickly identified some traits for example:
Surfboards
Cars
Beaches
Sand
Surfers 
Bright Colours
I know I want to include some of these elements in my own album cover to get the lanuage of the genre across.

This is a quick moodboard I made, there was some sand glewed to the bottom corner but it got all gross and fell off. I started looking at the type of fonts that were used in the album covers and the colours. I also looked at beach graphics I really like the graphics from the film Jaws and want to incorporate the no swimming sign into my cover as the album name as though it's warning that there is a killer cube on the loose.

Lasercutting 

On the Thursday session we had time to create something to be laser cut out. I chose to do a surfboard as I knew I wanted one in my cover and would benefit my project. I used Illustrator to create the drawing and made it the correct size for the toy car I am going to use in the scene so that it looks like it is sat on top of it,

One of the first things I though of using for this project was these little corgi toys cars that were my dad's when he was a kid. I used to play with them when I was younger at my grandad's house. I went to get them and came back with a bag of them. I thought this Chevrolet Impala was the perfect car to be my main center piece as it had the look of a beach type Americana car. I did find out after looking that it used to be a fire chief car so i decided to try and restore it a little.

I sprayed this little VW Beetle white to go in the background of my box.

I took the box through to uni and used a persil box which i covered in sand paper to go underneath my sand. I used brown sugar for my sand which looked a lot better than the bird sand and gave a more picturesque look.

I had my text lasercut out and then I spray painted it yellow. I went for a font that reminded me of holiday tiki bar type logo's and fit the surf rock aesthetic. I also played around with the font so some letters sat on top of others. I printed out a scene of a beach for my background. I was using bits of lino to glue to the back of my letters to raise them from the background to give it a shadow on the text.

I had the sides of my box cut in woodwork and then glue gunned them together and also used superglue. I found a plastic sheet that used to be for a frame to use for my front bit, as I want sand in the box i need the clear sheet to keep the sand it. I bought some bird sand? from pets at home to go in the box. I tried to create a cardboard stand to put the sand on so there was not too much weight but the cardboard just collapsed and the sand did not look great at all.

I created some little extras for my scene including a flag, beach towels, a campfire, a sandcastle, mini clothes and the sign inspired by Jaws that has my album name on it. I then photographed the box with lamp shining onto it harshly as I wanted to replicate the sun.