Individual Practice: Secret 7" Development

The deadline is fast approaching for entries into the Secret 7" competition, which I had been struggling with for a while. Initially, I wanted to get one cover over with and then work on another, but no great ideas have really come to for any of them, so I decided to just focus on getting my Elton John entry finished.

Here are some experimentations I have been working on in the past couple of weeks.
I had a couple of main design ideas for the brief, but the whole time it has been focussed on one line of the lyric from Bennie and The Jets 'She's got electric boots'.
Originally, I began with this as my illustration of the lyric.

This was the style I was going for originally, a little bit Hanna Barbera, quite childish and gimmicky, which after pondering for a while, I decided wasn't the right direction to take. The whole point of the song is that it's grown up rock and roll, spacey and seventies. Plus the colour purple has no relevance to the song, whereas the black and yellow do, because these colours are generally used for signifying electricity such as in the warning signs. I found this image on pinterest, which inspired me to create a new illustration for the cover which was a little simpler and more stylish. 

I then created the images below as a starting point for further development. 

 

 

I found that I liked the top 2 covers the best as ideas, but for different reasons. The yellow and black cover works well because it's bold and references the 'electric boots' using the bright and solid colours, but the pattern feels too busy and probably needs to be simplified. The second cover works well because it seems more spacey using the rotation of the pattern in varying colours, and probably reflects the seventies mood more successfully. I think that the illustration needed to be defined a little better, as the rounded edges don't give the image a strong enough definition and finish to the image. Further developments below. I tried to experiment more with the colour and the application of the pattern onto the cover, but I kept returning to the same kind of image that I was creating before, with the use of rotation or bright colour, as this makes the image more immediate and eye catching, which it will need to be as it is being entered into a competition. Some of the experimentations did end up being quite tacky also, but I needed to see what they looked like just to know where I was going wrong or right. 

I finally decided upon two that I really liked over the rest of them, and although I cannot enter both, I am happy with them as my final images. I have asked friends off the course whose opinion I respect to help me decide which to send off to the competition.