Illustration12 - The Lemon Twigs: As Long As We're Together

This song was a challenge for me to get a handle on, as The Lemon Twigs are a band I already like quite a lot. Because of this I thought illustrating one of their best songs would be easy in comparison to those I hadn't heard before.
WRONG-O
I found the concepts raised in the song really vague when I tried to translate them into the visual, I didn't want to just copy pictures from the music video and digitise them because I've been trying to focus on getting strong ideas first. The whole song is a strange mix of 70s style fragmented musical narrative with big crashing electric choruses, and its a mad contrast on purpose, which makes it amazingly difficult for me to pin down a consistent theme throughout it. After playing with imagery from the album art and the video in this early version:

I felt that I was overcomplicating things in an effort to try and fully explain this song in a single image. I want to illustrate the nature of the song rather than the entire narrative of it, so I chose to focus purely on shape based composition to achieve that.

I used the contrasting colours of pink and yellow to convey the clashing styles of music present in the song, and also the electric relationship between the speaker and the subject in the song. I wanted the shapes to compliment each other in a way that if one wasn't there, the design wouldn't work, communicating the message of "As long as we're together, I don't see what's wrong with that". There's an optimism to the relationship in the song, and I thought that neon signs often connote excitement and thrill, so I based the colour choice and shape choice on that imagery to communicate the fresh and exciting nature of the relationship the speaker and the subject share.

The main thing that doing this brief and my self initiated Secret7 brief has taught me is that its vital as an illustrator to have context, and know what it is you have to understand and translate. It isn't enough to 'like' a song in order to be able to comprehend it on a level that you can translate it into a completely different medium and still make it recognisable. Both these briefs have taught me the importance of research in idea generation.