For the last assignment of the year, we were given something a little looser and more fun to work with. The idea was to make an album cover using any medium we wanted, but with three random pieces of information. 
1. A random object that needs to somehow be included in the album design. My object was 2 "wheels" of straight pins. 
2. For the album title, we needed to go onto quotationspage.com, click "random quote" and then take the last few words from the last quote. I cheated and took a couple, one being "second entry" and the other "love isn't conditional". 
3. Lastly, for the artists' name, we went onto wikipedia.org and clicked on "random article". The title of the article is their name. The one that popped up for me was "Lisunov Li-2", which is an airplane of some sort. It seemed like a weird name, but I went with it... especially after the other options that came up when I kept pressing "random article" were even worse.

With these three pieces of information, I started by thinking around what I could do with the band's name. I noticed that some artists have logos, so I made some sketches of what that could look like.
I also tried Free Thinking, writing down whatever came to mind, starting with my object, "straight pins".

I also looked online for inspiration, by looking at other album covers and different things which have been done using straight pins.

At this point, I wasn't sure how I was going to approach the cover. I didn't know if I wanted to illustrate or photograph. I was kind of getting tired of doing all my stuff with digital illustrations, and had been wanting to photography all year, so I finally decided to just take a bunch of pics and see where that led me. The reason I hadn't been using photos in the past is because the only camera I have is my junky cell phone with only 72ppi, but I figured that this was a small printout assignment than all the others (7.25"x7.25"), so I could get away with it, especially if they ended up being majorly edited. 

My next step was to take what seemed like a million pictures of my object from every point of view and composition I could. 

After this, I took some of my favourites and edited them using Adobe Photoshop. I tried a bunch of things (some that I don't even remember how I did them), making different images with different effects. 

I narrowed in even more with my edited photos, choosing the best ones to add the final type to. 

In the end, this assignment was probably the most straight forward. I didn't get too fussy with process, digging deep or anything, but it was more about just having fun with random things. It was kind of nice and relaxing to have as a last project, and I really liked doing this one. When I was picking which one to do as my final, personally, I really liked this one. 

Nevertheless, I was surprised to see that everyone that I talked to and showed my designs to agreed unanimously that this one was my favourite. So, while I chose this as my final, I honestly liked quite a few of the covers I came up with. 

While I have no clue what Li-2's music would be like, it's pretty fun lookin', ain't it?