PROJECT 3

Project 3 began with the idea of creating album artwork for Beyoncé. I drew up concepts that related to her music while still trying to bring my own artistic flare into it. I wanted to create something that people wouldn't normally associate with her because she seemed to have been trying to get away from classic modes of advertising. She left her record label, created her own and began creating very avant-garde music videos to match her sound and lyrics.

I knew this would be fun to play off of so I thought of creating layered images through cutting and pasting to show the multi-faceted layers of Beyoncé, herself. She had gone through so many changes in the past few years from dropping the label and becoming a mother and it was showing in the change in her musical sound so I wanted to create something to reflect that.

On top of all of that she dropped the surprise album Lemonade as I was creating my concept so it added even more to the creative ideas I was coming up with. The album really focused on her loss of innocence through fame and how she felt unapologetic about her husband cheating on her so I knew I wanted to use those as fuel behind the creation of the images.

I began locating models and contacting them for the shoot. I wanted to keep the models fairly close to Beyoncé's skin tone and have them act as a type of "stand-in" for her to see how well it would work. My first image worked with the classic idea of what an album cover would be like and pulled inspiration from her Formation music video. She used New Orleans fashion and lyrics to express her idea of black womanhood so I wanted to expand on that.

In the second image, I wanted to create a very different feel by using illusion and reflection to communicate the multi-faceted life in which she leads. She is an a musical artist, businesswoman, mother and wife so I got the idea to make it seem as if she had multiple arms in order to juggle all of these responsibilities. The prayer pose her hands are in represent certain lyrics in her album such as "I pray to Lord, you reveal what his truth is", referencing the possible infidelity her husband took part in.

The third and final image is the most fragmented of the three and reference that loss of innocence I spoke of before. Beyoncé always speaks about the cost of fame in her songs and how she became a woman at such a young age. I took her identity out of the image by removing the top half oh her face and replaced it with a bouquet of flowers to represent the innocence she longs to have back. By only keeping the lower half of her face, I was also intending to bring more focus to her black features such as her full lips and large flattened nose.