Personal Voice Project album designs – ‘War Pigs’ by Black Sabbath

The personal voice project is one of great importance for my semester two assessment. Therefore, I felt it was essential that  I choose a subject area that is interesting, motivating and can stimulate work and experimentation.

As I enjoyed the music workshop in the previous few weeks, I decided to base my personal project on this by designing albums covers for a selection of some my favourite musical compostions. These ranged from different genres of Heavy Rock/metal, Rock N Roll, Blues, and Classical.

As with the music workshop, I systematically wrote down keywords, emotions, everything and anything that I was reminded of when listening to each musical compostions.  These would also decide which medium to use for each song and how to implement them.

For example, Paranoid and War Pigs by Black Sabbath reminded one of war, destruction, mechanical and industrilisation ( As the band themselves were born and raised in Birmingham –  a city of heavy industry and of the poor working classes of society.)Therefore, I started to collect objects and photograph that represented these aspects of the band and the song.

Nails, nuts, bolts, and spinlocks, tools, were objects I used to explore with ink, paint, charcoal, graphite. The use process of  burning of paper using matches/lighters one found to be quite successful when used in a controlled manner.

Locations around Brighton, including a building that was in the process of being demolished, provided me with imagery that reminded me of the song ‘War Pigs’ through its lyrics, and the sounds from the guitars and drums

 

the spinlocks of a dumbell weight combined with ink reminded one of the cogs of a machine or other industrial equipment . Indeed in the song War Pigs, the lyrics “as the war machine keeps turning”  felt visually communicated by these spinlock prints.

 

 

Regarding the typography for the War Pigs cover design, using ink with different brush strokes created a style that would be befitting to the overall design and compliment the imagery used.  I decided to use the first style as this  had a smoke and tattered aesthetic – an aeshetic that would  relate to the themes of war and destruction.

 

the burning experiment from the previous workshop proved to be useful for the War Pigs design as it was the perfect visual interpretation of the songs lyrics and was fitting to the themes of war, burning and destruction .