Secret 7- Etta James, At Last.

THE RULES

1. Your design must not include the artist’s name or
the song title

2. Concentrate your design on what will be the front,
only this will be visible in the exhibition

3. Dimensions should be 184mm x 184mm, with a 3mm
bleed all the way around. That’s 190mm x 190mm
in total. The bleed won’t be visible, so bear that
in mind

4. Your file must be produced in CMYK so it’s set-up
to be printed. Any PMS specials will be converted.
Metallic or fluorescent inks cannot be reproduced

5. Your file must be 300dpi

6. Your file must be saved as either a Tiff,
JPEG or PDF

7. Do try and reduce the size of your file as much
as possible - 10 MB maximum

8. You can submit a sleeve design for as many of our
tracks as you like, and more than one for each track

9. You must have until 23:59 GMT on 2 March 2016 to
upload your designs. Late submission will not be
accepted. We advise that you don’t wait till the last
few minutes to upload, as the site will be busy

10. Last but certainly not least - if we email you
with the good news that you’ve made it into the show
please keep it a secret. It makes for a much better
project!
We ask for all your details when you submit
a design so that we can shout about all our designers
once our sale day has passed and the secrets are out.
Note: design inspiration to be 140 characters
(including spaces) or less. MS Word count does not
include spaces so twitter is the best way to check
this. Avoid unusual characters. And remember, your
artwork is priority. Keep the description simple.


My submission is going to be for Etta James - At Last. I choose this song as it reminded me of something to do with spring and how it feels when the weather is changing. So i decided i wanted to do a landscape scene where the first glimpses of the sun would be poking through burnning away the winter gloom and doom. 

I take a lot of landscape related photos so i decided to pick out some of sunrises and sunsets ones to see if i could get some with good vibrant colour.  Im going  to try not spend too much time on this design as i have had in my head what im going to do since i first heard AT LAST. I think i might even drag my watercolour paints out to colour this one. 

Here I have drawn out the outline to my landscape image I have used marks to mark out the hills, sun and clouds as I feel this will look better on the final image and not just a plain old black line. 

Here I have taken my outlines and using watercolors I have added the color. I did this in a fairly fast time as I am known to spend ages messing around applying the paint and resulting  in a messy finish, so here I have done it quickly and tried to use the direction of my bush to define what direction the landscape is going in. Im happy with the outcome and glad i did not spent too long trying to get a perfect finish to the colour. 

So once the paint dried i scanned it into Photoshop and they i played around with the levels, brightness/contrast and hue/saturation to see if i could get a feel of depth and the warmth of the summer sun in the image. 

I was happy with certain elements of the final image the marks on the right hand side hill is my favorite bit as it gives over the directional flow of the landscape. And after along time of staring i was happy to submit the design. Then once i had submitted it to the contest i was not happy with how the sky looked as I feel the colours are now too much and could do with toning them down. 

The sight of that first summer sun finally getting here melting away the gloom of winter, this song is all about that.

My artwork did not make it to the show here is the email i have received to inform me. 

We're really sorry to have to tell you that your artwork hasn't made it into this year's exhibition. Thank you for getting involved in our project. We always have and always will have an enormous amount of respect for the effort and enthusiasm people like yourself show our Secret 7". We hope that you'll continue to follow and support us. With each year it’s becoming much harder to make our selections for the 700 sleeves in the show. This year we had almost 7,000 submissions on the website, smashing our previous record. Coupled with that, the overall quality is improving massively year on year. Sorry again. Delivering this news is the least enjoyable part of the project for us. If you’re in town, the exhibition will open from 8 April to 1 May at Sonos Studio in Shoreditch from 10am - 6pm, Tuesday to Sunday.