The Golden Age
The song I’ve decided to do is The Golden Age by The Asteroids Galaxy Tour. It was a song from a Heineken commercial back in 2011.
In the song lyrics, there were mentions about “the Broadway stage” and “a trip back in time”, which became inspirations for the rough ideas I came up with. Initially, I wanted to work more on the idea of time travelling (the left sketch), but I wasn’t able to think up of what to do within the clock face. Hence, the idea was scrapped and I worked on my second idea (the right sketch), which is picture of a theatre, inspired from “the Broadway stage”.
This is the reference image I used for my design. The theatre has two storeys, and both storeys have audience seats. The theme I was going for is the luxe feel from the ’30s (which is ‘The Golden Age’ the song is referring to). With Cheryl’s help on my mind map, I’ve decided to use velvet cloth for the seats to give a different texture to the cover.
I first drew up the base design. The most difficult part of the drawing is that of the theatre seats with one point perspective. I was going to do the front part of the cover mainly with paper cutting.
I transferred the base design onto a tracing paper so that I could ‘copy and paste’ the lines to the different sheets of coloured paper I was going to use for the paper cutting, so as to ensure that the end result would be aligned properly when I pasted the different layers together. This tracing paper is for the black paper.
This other tracing paper is for the other coloured papers. Thank goodness Cheryl suggested to me to just draw individual seats for the first few rows, if not the paper cutting part (to cut out the individual seats) would be extremely tedious to do.
The final front cover has a total of 5 layers to it. The bottommost layer is a whole 12″ by 12″ piece of red velvet cloth. The next layer is the black paper, whereby the seats in the theatre are cut out so as to show the velvet which represents the seats. The third layer is the light orange coloured paper which represents the walls in the theatre.
The second topmost layer contains the pillars and balconies. I’ve done this layer with acrylic paint on white paper. The base colour is a very pale yellow grey. I’ve added some vertical grey lines on the pillars so that the pillars aren’t smooth (which was a little boring.) The pink draperies on the balconies were done with thick layers of paint to give a more textured look, reminiscent of the folds and creases when cloth is being tied up. The pillars and draperies are accentuated with a little bit of gold paint to give the subtle luxe feel.
The topmost layer of paper is the wood stage flooring. This time round, I tried watercolour paint on white paper to have a more blended look with various shaded of brown. The name of the song and artist were written with black marker onto this layer (the fonts done with powerpoint and ‘copy pasting’ it with the help of tracing paper), but it didn’t pop up as hoped, thus I added some gold linings on the song name to make them pop a little more.
The microphone in the middle was done using metal wires twisted into shape and glued together. Normal craft glue wasn’t strong enough to stick metal together, so I ended up resorting to using shoe gum to stick them.
The overall temperature of the front cover is on the warmer side, which is inspired from the yellow tint in vintage photos.
The back cover has a door in the centre to signify opening a door to a new world, or according to the lyrics of the song – “a trip back in time”. It is drawn according to the design of the door that appeared in the beginning of the Heineken commercial (where The Golden Age was used as the theme song). The door is done in watercolour pencils and water to blend the colours. For the stained glass, I used more vibrant colours so that the overall picture does not look too depressing.
Initially, I planned to use the leftover red velvet cloth for the red carpet, but thought it might be an overkill, therefore I swapped to using a cut out red coloured paper. The grey bricks in the background were added in at the last minute because just the door itself looked rather awkward and lonely.
In this final project, I tried to bring the essence of the lyrics into my design, using objects that can be linked to the song. The making of the cover was also very tedious due to the layers of paper cutting. Although the final product did not end up exactly as I pictured in my mind (I’m a little disappointed, to be honest), it had been a very good experience – from the brainstorming of ideas to the touching up of the final piece before submission.