Marbled Ecstasy

This project was a really fun way to end off this school year. I loved the whole concept right from the beginning! It felt like a little challenge: what can you make by throwing a bunch of random shit together?

So first, we chose our cool dollar-store objects! This was a hard decision because there was a lot of cool stuff there, but I chose some sweet marbles:

Then we got to choosing our band names, i.e., the title of a random Wikipedia entry. I went through a lot of them, and when I got to Ham Wall it made me laugh. It was such a weird little thing that I stuck with it.

I went through a lot of quotes too, courtesy of this website, and also found quite a few neat little album names. The one I decided to choose was "Ecstasy at Your Feet". I have no idea what the full quote was, or who said it, but those last four words were perfect.

After that was settled, I tried figuring out some cool stuff I could do with the marbles that could apply to the album cover, so I messed around a little bit, especially with the marbles that were translucent.

I started sketching out some ideas. I had some thoughts in my head about the material we were given. Marbles are really smooth, pretty, they sound nice when they clack together. They had a real sensual quality to them, and the title of my album was "Ecstasy at Your Feet" and I really thought it'd be cool to have something foot related on the cover too. Establishing the connection would really hammer in the meaning of the title.

I doodled some ways I could create that relationship:

I wasn't even sure in which medium I wanted to do this project. I was thinking of trying out gouache but I'm not confident enough with it, and I was running out of time.

One of the marbles I had kind of reminded me of a crystal ball, so I doodled a fortune teller hovering over a crystal ball, except instead of divining the future with her hands, she's got her feet there instead.

I tried out some other ideas but I started really liking the fortune teller thing, so I went back to it and decided to whip it up in illustrator, which was oodles of fun.

I had the basics of what I wanted done and began experimenting with background colours:

I really dug the pink! I decided to make the crystal ball glow so I threw in some gradients. As you can see, I used actual pictures of the marbles in the design to make it a little more dynamic than if it was 100% vector.

And I did indeed include the name of the album and band. I'm not surprised if you can't see them that well. I really liked the background colour but I also really liked the colour of the text and I couldn't find a compromise between the two that I liked, so I left them like that. In hindsight, I'd just make the text a lighter value while keeping the orange tone.

A couple final tweaks aaaaaannnd:

I'm pretty happy with this! I'm still new to Illustrator so it was a bit of a challenge figuring some things out, but this was so much fun!

I'd like to imagine that Ham Wall is an alternative rap group with some strong 70s funk and soul and 90s hip hop influences. I feel like they'd be wacky enough to enjoy something like this.

Some inspiration: