Memories: The Don Ameche’s Band

In the late 1980’s and early 90’s I created a fantasy band named after the actor Don Ameche from the film Trading Places. We were a three piece band with Wendy on drums, Terri on bass and me on guitar. At the time I was just learning to play the guitar so the idea of an imaginary band made perfect sense. I had even written songs for this ficticious trio.  These people never existed, but over the years the memory of this false creation has permeated so much that my friends actually think that I was in a band. I have to remind them that I made the whole thing up.

Don Ameche: Trading Places

Research: Raymond Pettibon, Sonic Youth

Influenced by grunge music of the early 1990’s I listened to a lot of Sonic Youth, Pixies, Smashing Pumpkins and Black Flag. The characters I created all had troubled backgrounds and the music that I tried to create echoed the early punk sound of the 1990’s. For the brief I went through my CD collection and wanted to recreate the artwork of my imaginary band including tour flyer and cd artwork. One artist who was prolific at the time was Raymond Pettibon. He did the cover artwork for Black Flag and Sonic Youth. His use of heavy black lines and hand lettering created an instantly recognisable style. The aggressive and confrontational artwork that I remember from that time seemed to capture the music scene. Using these research points I started to work with this style in re-creating my own band artwork.

Trying to remember other memories I also drew upon a chocolate bar that I recalled my Grandad used to treat us with called Fry’s Five Boys Chocolate. The wrapper was very distinctive, depicting the five stages of being rewarded with a chocolate bar. Looking at the artwork today it seems a little disturbing. Each child was titled with the various stages: Desperation, Pacification, Expectation, Acclamation and Realistaion ‘it’s Fry’s’.

Using this memory I contextualised a couple of the titles and reworked them into the cd cover artwork.

 Tour Flyer Outcome

Using a  rendering of Don Ameche I stencilled the image with various colours in an attempt to block out any detail. Then working away from the sketch book scanned the image into photoshop to create the flyer. Originally I was going to incorporate the Fry’s boy image but instead I decided to use the titles.

  

Adding the Admission Free tabs at the bottom of the flyer and the title tracks of the songs help create the overall effect of an authentic tour flyer of my fictitious band.

 

Outcome: CD Cover

Building from the theme of the ‘Fry’s Five Boys’ I twisted the wording to ‘Five Boys Fry’ with an image that characterises the resistance of acclamation and is replaced with the title ‘Desperation, Expectation and Fuck this shit!’. The idea behind this concept was to illustrate the exact opposite of what a good boy receives. Rather than the reward of a chocolate bar this particular boy commits a crime and will end up in the electric chair.

     

Conceptualising the artwork into other  mediums pushed the initial design.

 

Critical Analysis

The challenge presented a visualisation of artwork. Within the exercises I attempted to explore and create different realisations of the initial concept. The rendering of the subject and the placement of the composition within the tour flyer is effective when contextualised in the poster montage. Reworking these themes and utilising bold lines and block colours of the pose is an attempt at being  reminiscent of the tour posters of the early 1990’s. Overall the project required a representation of an imaginary imagery. Visualising the memory was a challenge to convey.