The Concept Album
The concept album I was given was “Meat is Murder” by The Smiths. I listened to the album and thought it was very depressing and the opposite of what time around Christmas should feel like. To find out what was the concept of this album, I made a summary of each of the songs. The album seemed to be about all the sad things that happen in life and the fact that we can’t control them.
One song that stood up to me was “Meat is Murder” because it targeted people as the cause of animal suffering instead of complaining about how bad life is for us like the rest of the songs are. This song was like a statement that shows how our actions make this world corrupted, and it doesn’t affect only people but other living beings.
Mind map
The album was supposed to promote vegetarianism I felt like the songs in this album purposely pointed out all the bad things we as human beings did to create a sense of guilt and encourage people to help. This made me start thinking about what I can do as an artist to take the concept of this album and create something physical that can respond to the things that this album is encouraging us to do.
I created a mind map that consists of the feelings this song brings the audience and what was the purpose of the album to analyse the atmosphere. I used colours to associate all the words with these feelings. It helped me in creating a mood board and colour palette.
Atmosphere
The song “Meat is Murder” uses very strong words such as “Murder” to describe the way people slaughter animals to eat them. It creates a strong feeling of the quilt by accusing us of doing something unforgivable. This way the author tried to pressure the audience to stop animal cruelty and start fighting for their rights.
Another example of building atmosphere in this song is describing one of the senses as “sizzling and the unholy stench Of MURDER” to make the audience imagine the feeling of disgust upon murdering animals.
The song directly questions the audience “Do you know how animals die?” to make people think about their actions and how they affect animals. It also uncovers the brutal truth that “death for no reason is MURDER”, which creates a deep feeling of sadness and the need to take responsibility for one’s actions.
The song suggests that we are trapped in a cruel world we created ourselves. The world was built for human beings to overpower all other living beings, but it is not a good thing. It shows us how heartless and emotionally dispatched people became and stopped seeing things the way they are.
"Meat is Murder" Lyrics for a reference
Colour Palette
Identifying the atmosphere helped me pick a few colours that may represent certain feelings I want to show through my work. However, I wanted to take one step further and investigate how these feelings and colours are applied in animal protection campaigns. I investigated posters, logos and artwork associated with animal protection to investigate how I could encourage people to help animals through colour influence. It turned out that the colours from my mind map already fit into this category very well. However, there are a few colours I haven’t yet looked into that I would like to consider when it comes to a final colour palette for my products.
The colours I previously thought about were purple, blue, green, red and orange. It represents animal cruelty, sadness, and animal protection, going against killing animals and encouraging people to take action. During my research, I also found that many charities use yellow as a positive way to encourage the public to help animals.
Studying these posters taught me that all the above colours are often used to advertise animal protection. This knowledge will determine my choice of the final colour palette, but it also gave me the idea to design a poster to advertise my work to help sales.
The final colour palette is going to be a mix of sad and positive colours that will influence the audience to help animals. I carefully picked four colours by pairing two sets of complementary colours to create a combination with a variety of colours. The colours I chose are blue, purple, orange and yellow. The reason behind it is that I wanted to experiment with a wide range of colours as I tend to stick to two contrasting colours or a triadic colour scheme. I often followed these patterns to stay in my comfort zone, as you can’t go wrong with these two rules. However, I want to develop my knowledge about the meaning and effect of the colours on the audience further. This knowledge will help me influence the audience, which is an important marketing skill often used in designing posters and adverts. It is also necessary for me to practice these skills as it will help not only in advertising any future events at the university and promoting my artwork as the independent artist I aspire to become one day.
Final and supporting product ideas
The first thing I considered before deciding what possibilities I had, was the budget for this project. I didn’t want to risk spending hundred pounds for products that may not sell or profit. Since it was going to be my first time selling my work at a bigger event, I decided to set my budget as 20 pounds, which I think it’s a reasonable amount for a first-time investment.
The budget I set myself was limited, but so was the time. I made a note of all the things I may want to try to produce and sell, such as plush keyrings, stickers, badges and prints. However, I always set myself bigger goals than I could achieve. Considering other projects, I have had to work on, there was not enough time to try everything at once. The best solution was to choose one product that would be refined to a high standard and two that would be easy to make. I decided the premium product should be 3D animal characters, and the supporting products would be badges and stickers.
The reason why I decided to do plush keyrings is a unique idea that would interest more people rather than badges, prints or stickers that every other student will sell. For the supporting product, I would like to make badges and stickers for the experience. Badges and stickers are very popular products that I have seen many times at Comic-Con, so I would like to learn the process of making them. Learning new ways of producing various products will come in handy for the next event.
Another thing that I had to consider was inflation. If thousands of people struggle to afford the cost of living, how much would they spend on the Winter Fair? I think no matter how high is going to be the quality of my premium product, people will not buy it if it’s going to cost twenty pounds each. That’s why I wanted to investigate the most affordable materials so that the final price will be affordable to many people. I considered charity shops, Primark, craft shops around and online shops.
The first source of materials I thought would be the cheapest was a charity shop near me. I tried to look for the colours of fabrics I needed, but I was unsuccessful. However, made note of prices to then keep looking around and compare the prices. Most charity shops were selling materials for roughly 3-10 pounds, which didn’t make me very happy as I knew there were cheaper fabrics I could buy in Primark. Primark t-shirts cost 2.50 pounds each, so way cheaper than anything from a charity shop. They also had a variety of colours I needed. I bought four tops matching the colour palette I created, plus black and white for any details or experiments I might want to make.
Craft materials became very popular, especially since people started looking into new hobbies during the pandemic. Every craft shop I visited offered a small number of pieces, such as keyrings or buttons, for a very overpriced price of 2-5 pounds. My alternative was an online shop called Shein, and since I am a regular customer, I had a discount and voucher for free shipping.
The supporting products were less complicated as I didn’t need to chase for any materials because I have a friend that will let me use the badge maker for as little as 20p per badge. The same goes for stickers.
After all the long time I spent looking for the best and cheapest materials I could get to estimate the price for the products. I thought to sell the keyrings for 2 pounds, badges for 2 pounds and stickers for 50p. However, I wanted to wait for the first presentation and the feedback on my ideas to get some second-hand opinions.
First Presentation
We were asked to prepare 10 minutes brief presentation about the concept and ideas for this project. After presenting everything I’ve done so far, I had some questions.
The first thing I needed advice on was how many designs of plush keyrings would be enough and what would be considered too little. One of my lectures recommended producing 3-4 designs as the keyrings are a small product. The next thing I’m going to do will be to plan what four animals design.
Another question was about my idea of doing some animal charity to encourage people to buy my product and help animals. I was planning to donate 10% of the profit, which may be only a few pounds, but I believe any penny helps. I think my lecturers found my idea interesting since they haven't disagreed with it. I believe it will have an impact on my sales in terms of the type of advertisement because people love to help, especially around Christmas time.
Keyring design
I created a mood board with various examples of rag dolls as an inspiration for my plush keyrings. When I listened to the album and looked at the aesthetics of The Smiths, it gave off punk vibes, so I decided to look at punk plushies and dolls. I looked into this particular type of doll was the fact that these dolls were made to look scary, sad and dead, which is a part of what “Meat is Murder” is. My idea was to create a collection of dead-looking animals inspired by a song about murdering animals.
At first, I had a lot of ideas about making the animals look dead and punky. For example, I could add black stitches around their body, wounds and missing eyes. However, I had to consider the audience and the event itself. Things like this would be more suitable for Halloween, rather than a Winter Fair. I have decided to keep it simple by keeping the idea of rag dolls with button eyes but no scars or anything too scary. This way, it could be a gift for adults, children and teens.
I looked up information about which animals are the most affected by human consumption and other activities. The most affected are foxes by the fashion industry for their fur, ducks by the food industry for their meat, rabbits by scientists to experiment and seals by the pharmaceutical industry for their fat. I picked these four species because each stands for an industry that kills thousands of animals every year.
I created four mood boards where I tried to identify shapes such as long, pointy ears, round bodies and tiny paws. Next, I put together these shapes to design four different characters. I also match each of them with a suitable colour. I tried to match their natural colours. The exception was a rabbit, which I decided to associate with purple colour because it stands for animal cruelty, and the rabbit is often used in logos of anti-animal cruelty campaigns.
I started by putting shapes on the mood board and creating a silhouette of the character. Next, I added colour and details like eyes, mouth or paws. All the characters got a round bodies to make them look cute so that people sympathize with them.
The ears, tails and feet are what make them different from each other. If we look at the silhouettes of the character, it is obvious that each of them is different, and it’s impossible to mistake them for each other. Last year I learnt how to create recognizable characters determined by their silhouettes, which helped me design unique characters.
Although sewing wasn’t a new skill to me, my first attempt looked like I completely forgot how to do it. I remembered how to prepare a sewing pattern made from paper. However, when it came to sewing pieces together there were a lot of things that went wrong. The first very noticeable thing was the stitch running across the neck of the character. The same goes for ears. The stitches on the sides were going out of its body because I used too big a needle. I also tried to add a nose since I heard a lot from other people that its face looked empty. I clearly needed one more practice.
In my second attempt, I decided to keep the body and the head as one piece to avoid visible stitches. I also picked a small needle so the piece won’t fall apart like the previous one. In terms of ears, I sew them on the inside, and then I flipped the fabric on the right side. It helped in hiding the stitches and making the head look round and the places where I run the stitch tidy.
Since everything looked much better than in the first attempt, I decided to create a final version in colour. This time I decided not to include the nose, it didn’t look right, and someone may mistake it for a mouth. In the end I altered this design and added a mouth, so its face does not look empty, so its face doesn’t look empty.
I kept the shape of the body the same for each creature while cutting out the pattern and continuing the process of sewing them together. I didn’t come across any more issues with sawing them. However, I started to feel like I was running out of time since I had to produce a few copies of each creature. I couldn’t help but get on with supporting products while sewing one or two keyrings a day. In the end I produced 12 keyrings.
Considering the fact that we live in post-pandemic world people prefer to buy items in packaging to avoid spreading germs. I used clear foil sleeves to pack all my products and sealed them with colourful tape. I think it looks very cute, and the fact that the items are protected from germs, scratches or damage will increase the sales.
Badge Designs
For the badge design, I thought it would be a good idea to include direct or similar words and quotes from the song. For example, the song refers to animals as “Beautiful Creatures” because it makes people think about animals as beautiful living creatures that should be protected rather than murdered.
I wanted at least one badge to be generic for anyone to buy regardless of their views and opinion about animals. The song mentioned that “it’s not normal, natural or kind” to kill animals, so I want the design to be similar to something like Be Kind or Be Kind to Animals. I think these are very encouraging words to share some kindness, which are universal and could be interpreted in many ways.
The last quote I would like to include is “who hears when animals cry?” because it refers to the part about the sad truth told throughout the album about nobody caring about those who are not able to speak up for themselves. Since Winter Fair is around Christmas time, I didn’t want to put anything too depressing on the badges, but I wanted the badges to speak up the truth to make people aware of the situation.
My friend gave me a quick induction on how to use her badge maker, and I was ready to go. The process of making badges was very simple. I printed the illustrations for the badges and cut them out. Next, I inserted a silver plate for the badge and placed the picture and the protective foil on top of it. Then use a badge maker to press them all together. Once that’s done the machine should pick up the badge piece. In the end, I had to insert the piece with a pin and press it together again. And that’s it. I ended up making around 28 badges. However, some didn’t come out. One of the problems I had was not pulling the handle hard enough, and that caused the badges not to attach to the base with the pin. Another problem was that some of the protective foils were defective and had strange rainbow colour dots on them. All these badges ended up costing me £5.60, which was pretty cheap.
Now I know how to make badges and I'm considering to buy my own badge maker that I can use to produce badges for events like MCM London.
Stickers
One of my friends got a sticker business and decided to help me with making some stickers for me. She gave me clear instructions on what files I should send her and how to prepare them.
I designed a cute character in Krita and drew a white border around it to make sure the sticker machine wouldn't cut the sticker in the wrong place. I sent it as a png to my friend, who printed it for me. However, it turned out that I made the white border around it too thin, and all of the stickers ended up miss cut.
Despite my trying to make the border thicker, it happened again. After a few tries, I gave up because I didn’t have enough time to keep trying. I ended up with 4 stickers for free since most of them didn’t work out.
I learnt that making stickers it's a complicated process which may take years to learn because of how complicated the software and printer for stickers may be.
I liked making stickers, but the process was too complicated. I would love to try making stickers again in the future but try a different method or equipment.
Stall set up plan
For my stall, I’m going to use a blanket I got at home, as table covers are expensive. To lay out the products on the table, I’m going to use plastic baskets I won to create different level platforms to display my work standing and lying down. On the front of the table, I’m going to attach some adverts on my social media and the charity poster to inform people where they can find me and the fact that by buying anything from my stall, they contribute to a charity. On the corner of the table, I will display a price list to make my customers aware of the prices.
Posters
I used the knowledge from the previous posters we made during this project and created three various posters.
The first poster is a price list that clearly states the names and prices of every product. I hope it will help the audience find the prices easily as they are all in one place. It also advertises my affordable prices, which means people are more likely to check my stall out and buy my products.
The second poster advertises the charity I am planning to donate to as a part of my project, but it also encourages people to buy my products to help.
The last poster advertises my social media. It includes a code that you can scan, and it should take you to my Instagram, or you can type my name in. I didn't design business cards yet, so I came up with this alternative idea for people who would like to follow me or check out my social media.
All the posters were very effective forms of advertisement. However, in the future, I want to use more than one form of advertisements, such as posters and business cards, to tell people about what I'm doing and how to find me. I think these two methods combined will bring better results, and more people will be interested in looking into my work since they have more than one option.
Overall, I'm happy with how all my products turned out. Although I love the keyrings I made, I would like to concentrate on drawing rather than 3D products. It's because I don't think these represent the type of work I would like to do as an artist. I would prefer my illustrated pieces to be the main focus of my work as it shows something I would like to do in the future.