Yingying Liu
Album Covers
In the digital age, is the art of record album covers dead? The answer is definitely no. Musicians, artists and music fans still have a long-lasting love for album covers, whether it is physical records or digital records. As a student studying how to become an "artist I want to be" in New Media, I came into contact with this industry with the idea of trying to understand and practice various art types.
A good album cover must have its own theme, and the finished product must be able to cooperate with the music, rather than aimlessly create it randomly. Although I am only practicing this type of art, it is essential to choose a clear theme. There are thousands of beautiful songs in the world, and it is not easy to select some of them.
Fortunately, I have a roommate who loves music. Vivian Li often covers different songs. So I tried to cooperate with her, which is also a happy thing because I can also learn how to cooperate with musicians at the same time. The visual music world I want to show is not only the emotion I want to express, but also the emotion the musician wants to express.
In the process of cooperation, I tried to understand the feeling of her singing, because even in the same song, different singers may express different emotions. And sometimes I may have different ideas for the same song, not necessarily my initial idea for each work is the final product, I need to produce all these ideas and discuss with her. The most important thing in album cover design is still the presentation of music. If the singer’s song emotions are not well expressed, then the work cannot be called an excellent “album cover”.
I am not a master painter. Compared to completely hand-painted works, I am better at processing simple photos or hand-painted patterns or licensed material images using Photoshop and other software for multiple processing. The "Initial" series is my first attempt in this field.
The "Life" series is my second batch of works. They are named this way because the themes of this batch of works are related to human nature and destiny. I try to use some emotional elements when creating, including choosing the background and adjusting the colour to give the whole work an emotional atmosphere.
Especially one of the themes that I created three different choices, the name of the song is "I want to love this world", it is a song made for depression. This is also my favourite song in this series, so I spent the most time creating it. I did not choose a cool colour but a warm colour like red and orange as the main colour of the picture, because I think this colour is the true desire of the depressed patient, just like the title of this song. Whether it is a meteor or a firework, they are all fleeting beauty, but they leave indelible traces in the lives of others, allowing people to see the beauty of life in a moment of brilliance. I hope that the images on the cover other than the title should give the audience the same feelings as the theme of the song so that people can feel the visual world of music through the cover.
I also tried to make a more unique style of cover, and I chose the "Chinese style". My love and understanding of this style of cultural background can give me more help. In this series of works, I will not put too many elements in the same picture, but make it have some abstract content while keeping the overall clean, mostly about natural scenes, because Chinese culture likes to use landscapes to express emotions. In the elements of painting, I also prefer to use the style of ink and wash, and the colours are the most common colours in Chinese paintings.
One of my favorite album cover is the impression album covers for Vivian Li.She likes to sing cheerful songs, and she is also an optimistic and enthusiastic person. So I made an album for her that represents happiness and joy, and hopefully makes people feel like summer.
