To help narrow down my choices even further I created a variety of sketches for the two songs that I felt had the most potential - Art School, and Dream 3.
Initial ideas for Art School included looking into the influence of the Bauhaus on the attitude towards both the art world and art schools. Having already used the Bauhaus within a past project I am very aware of the social and political attitudes that surrounded the movement, and when listening to The Jam's track I felt a similar sense of rebellion, and a touch of irony, and could see many potential parallels between it and the social and political nature of the 1970's, when the track was released. From this I envisioned a cover design that was scrappy in nature - one that reflected the d.i.y aesthetic that took over many creative outlets in the 70's (art, music, fashion, youth politics etc). I looked at the possibility of using found imagery from the Bauhaus itself and creating a set of mixed media collages, adding either handwritten or stamped words and phrases commonly used in both the time of the bauhaus and the 1970's. Extending on from this, words and/or phrases found in newspapers from each era could also be stamped onto t-shirts, hands, and arms, or surfaces in an art studio or the street.
I also looked into a way the album cover itself might become a tool to help the user become an 'artist', by applying a paint or ink filled bubble wrap bubble to the front, with the intention that it be popped and the cover would be completed. In a similar vein to this a piece of material saturated with ink would be shrink-wrapped to the cover, so when the album is bought and unwrapped, the users fingers would become covered in ink and the white album cover would act as a blank canvas for the user to create a design on purely through chance and circumstance.
For the track Dream 3 I had a variety of ideas to use the theme of space, or the moon, to create a cover design. With the song having obviously strong connotations to sleep and dreaming, this seemed like a relatively simple way of approaching the design. My ideas included creating a simple but detailed image of the moon embossed and/or foiled onto the album sleeve, or creating a more abstract appearing scene of the universe using very small hand painted stars. However, during the interim critique it became clear that due to the lack of lyrics in the song, many people had also turned to the idea of space or the moon, and the theme became overused and unoriginal, and so I decided to rule of Dream 3 as an option for the competition.
From these sketches, and the feedback gained from the interim critique, I concluded that for me personally, my ideas for Art School had the most potential to be developed further as the subject matter is important to me and would also be a way to explore my own opinions on the art world and art education today.