Kikuo Inspired Album Cover

Finished and coloured version for my illustration music cover assignment.

Along with the hand texture exercise and bulldog altered book, my first illustration assessment is to create a music album cover for an existing band or musician of my choice with a minimum of five different pen textures. I've picked Kikuo because he's one of many Vocaloid producers I enjoy listening to after ten years ago.

This month, I've been listening to his most recent music album, Kikuo Miku 7, especially playing "Hate you, Hate you, Hate you, But..." (きらいきらいきらいって) in loop. Along with my recent break up with my ex, the song mentions snow and it brings me a different interpretation with a personal connection drawing me to the song the most. Little does anyone know, one of my names means snow to the point I thought about being called "Yuki" online. Either way, the song is how I felt about my latest ex as I can't hate him in the end while parting ways in neutral terms with closure. Songs like this can help me cope with myself and appreciate the artist.

Despite Kikuo is known for composing dark meanings in his songs, I noticed he uses water and space-related themes in his music, such as "Water, Water, Yu, Yu" (みずみずユッユ) with water sound effects and even "Dance of the Frogs" (カエルのおどり) involving universes. To go along with the watery and spacey themes, I drew my second draft for this assignment before printing it onto an A3 size paper as a base of the illustration. I also loved this concept out of my first six drafts beforehand because they're too similar to Kikuo's existing album covers.

The assignment also involves students handwriting the title of the album they're creating their inspiration from, and I named mine "KikuoSi_ku" (きくおしーく) after being inspired by one of Kikuo's albums, "KikuoHana" (きくおはな) with the collaboration with Hanatan (花たん). Shi_ku (しーく) is an artist who makes most of Kikuo's albums and noticed she's also a music composer in my late research. They've also done a collab album together for Ikitama, but never once I've seen them using the album name I'm using for my assignment.

The music cover assignment started on the 28th of February with a mood board ready as the source of inspiration for drafts. Unfortunately, I left class early that day and wasn't able to show up to college the next week due to my mental and physical health.

On the 13th of March, I received permission from my illustrator teacher for an extension to catch up with the assessment and began my second draft on Photoshop. The teacher forbids using Photoshop except for adding colours to the final version, but he allowed me to start sketching it digitally and enlarged the drawing to the correct size. I used the school's light table to trace the sketch on a new blank A3 paper with a pencil and made a lot of changes to the character's hair. The character I drew is a random girl I don't have in mind, but she's mainly inspired by Shi_ku's characters in most of her artworks. Afterwards, I did the rest by hand with a black fine-liner pen, using different pen textures as possible on the character's hair.

The following week, on the 20th of March, I was stressed out when someone accidentally bumped into my table and caused mistakes in my drawing. Even though it wasn't the end of the world, it was upsetting how much I worked on the drawing. Luckily, my teacher allows me to use Photoshop to erase the mistakes so I don't have to restart everything from the beginning. Not only that, I was surprised everyone was given an extra week extension as it seems like my class is falling behind too.

I managed to finish the black and white traditional version on the 24th of March, but I don't have an A3 scanner at home and left it until the 26th of March to scan the drawing at my college's printing room, leaving me with a day left to complete the whole assessment.

The 27th of March was presentation day for the whole class and I continued working on my assignment during my first class on a different subject, rushing to get everything done before the next class. Oddly, some luck showed up with my teacher letting everyone know in my class that presentation day was cancelled until the following week and left college early due to an unspecified emergency on his end. Because of that, the coincidence made me unhappy for rushing the final results of my drawings, despite how many people said they liked my work.

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Lastly, on the 28th of March, I was stubbornly fixing the colours in CMYK and managed to finish it on my bus ride to college — sitting in the luggage space along with my belongings, undisturbed by the crowd.

I asked my teacher for one last extension to submit my presentation. He permitted it before leading me to the glass cabinet of other students' works on the assignment and left me a space for mine after liking the process of my work. Because of his generosity, I stayed after class to print and trim my work before I left for my birthday dinner with my family. 

I didn't keep a record, but this assignment took me many days and hours to complete, even as the second highest priority of my college assessments. It was difficult to replicate Shi_ku's art style, but it was fun trying out a different style with another challenge of drawing in thin lines.

In the end, I was happy after some people saw the finished result to be a very convincing album that could belong to Kikuo's albums.