Brand New - "Placebo Effect" Album Poster

Hello again, everyone.  Below is my submission for Project One.  In my previous blog post I explained the reasons why I picked the items that I did.  I decided against including some things like the oxygen tank or the X in the face's eyes simply because the tank would have added one thing too many and the X just didn't look right.  This was quite an experience to try to get through!  I can't wait to compare trials and errors with the rest of the class.

PhotoMontage Sketch

So this is my first foray into sketching and I thought it actually didn't go as badly as I anticipated.  I worked on trying to come up with a good band name but, despite so many times when I've thought, "Man, that would be a great band name," none came to mind.  For now, I chose the band I was going to base my fictional one off of, Brand New.  I came up with a fake album name which is "Placebo Effect," although that's a little hard to read in my sketch.  So here's the image of it and I'll try to explain the elements below it:

Ok, so I sort of took the idea of a placebo effect being your brains way of tricking you into believing a medicine is working even if it isn't actually the real medicine to tie into the effect that prescription pills can have on a person's mind.  First of all, the little X marks are meant to be stars signifying that the background is supposed to look like outer space ("spaced out.")  In the top left corner is a clock face with the hands winding around it and looping around themselves to signify a loss of sense of time.  I drew a larger circle around my original one because I'd like it to be a bit bigger. Towards the bottom of that side, I have an electric clock showing infinity signs instead of numbers to drive home the loss of control of time yet again. 

In the right corner is the sun.  I put little squiggles coming out of it to represent that I would like it to have a glow coming from it.  In the middle of sun is what's supposed to be like an oven with iron bars across the front and flames inside it.  This is meant to represent a warped understanding of basic knowledge caused by psychosis because the sun is not powered by an internal oven like that, but the person can't grasp that idea.

I have an oxygen tank floating around in the background.  I'm not sure if I want to keep that or not.  That's supposed to be a reminder of a hospital-like atmosphere.  Like the person may be in his own mental world, but there are still random reminders of where he really is. Below the tank and the electric clock is supposed to be a swan with a black face, but a white body.  If I can't make that work, I'll just let it be a black swan.  I tend to think of white swans as being symbolic of innocence and grace, so a black swan tends to offset that ideal.  Just look at Swan Lake!  Next to that are traditional looking pills floating through the space toward a figure's mouth.  The figure I have is the face in the background.  I have envisioned it as being the profile of a male statue's face that will cover about half of the poster, but other things will be layered over it and it will be on the more transparent side in terms of opacity.  Right now, I have an X in the one visible eye, but again I'm not sure if I'll keep that.

As for the text, I would like the band name to be in big, black block letters and be pretty imposing a little bit above center and diagonal.  The album name will be on the same diagonal but way down in the bottom right corner.  I would like that font to be kind of shaky or squiggly-looking to represent being out-of-sorts as a result of a medication.

Right now, the whole thing appears rather busy, but with the size requirements we were given, I should be able to space things out a little more; I just forgot to honor the dimensions of the poster in my sketch.  That's certainly something I'll try to remember to do next time.  I'm also not sure how much of this I'll actually be able to do , but I'll give it my best shot!