Illustration 12 - Let's Eat Grandma: Deep Six Textbook

In the end, I decided against using hand drawn elements in this design, as they work really well to develop my ideas, but there's too much of an aesthetic clash with the digital method I'm trying to understand through these covers. I'm happy with this final version, I simplified the elements down to a stage I felt comfortable they are recognisable while still retaining a surreal and strange visual style. I mainly just wanted to capture the things the lyrics brought into my mind when listening to the song. The lyrics combine surreal underwater imagery with imagery of youth, school and the frustrations of being perceived as a child when all your feelings say to you that you're an adult (which of course in hindsight, you aren't). Specific lines that inspired my thinking here were:
"We live our lives in the textbook, and letter by letter
I feel like standing on the desk, and screaming "I don't care"
Oh, and I was such a quiet child, oh I, was I?"
This line really captures for me the feeling of emptiness than can often occupy a teenage mind. The speaker is clearly an introvert, but that doesn't mean she doesn't feel all the things everyone else is feeling and have the same frustrations of changing from a child into an adult. I wanted to capture this by having the surreal images of the tentacles encroaching on the boring image of the school textbook.

I bet the starfish wonder
Why we're so obsessed
Why we feel so stressed (boring)
I wish you all the best
You're making me upset (enduring things)

We're heading straight to the east coast
It's just gone bitter
The ocean doesn't care, the waves will curl our hair
In summertime, when days collide
Say, "Why didn't we? Why didn't we?"
GoThese two final verses of the song really brought my ideas forward, as they are so odd and surreal, using examples such as starfish and waves as having personalities, yet immediately relatable. I wanted to combine the surreal with the normal for this cover, because ultimately that's everything the song is about. I heard it as the inner thoughts of an introverted speaker, someone who is part of the real world but has no sense of really belonging there, the other world of the ocean is described as fantastical and calming, reassuring, while the real world is bitter and unaccommodating to people who aren't sure what they want from it. Once I really engaged with the song I found it much easier to come up with an illustration for it, as I feel more emotionally invested in it, and it matters to me to be able to represent those feelings visually.