Album cover of the week: U2 - War

As i've mentioned in previous posts, as well as my card designing, I'm also very interested in art, design and music and one particular area of design that I love, is album cover artwork.  In these posts I want to highlight some of my favourite covers and try and explain why I liked them.

In my teens, I was always in and out of my local record shop, and there were always two album covers that stood out to me, the aforementioned Rio by Duran Duran and the other was, U2's, "War".  From the very first time I saw this striking and powerful black and white image with it's bold red typography running down the side, not only did it become one of my favourite album covers, it also became one of the most iconic covers of the 1980's.  At a point when Northern Ireland was at the height of its troubles, this photograph of an angelic, yet intense looking young boy was capturing a moment in time.

WAR

The photograph of the young boy on the cover is Peter Rowan (brother of Bono's friend, Guggi).  He also appears on the covers of Boy, Three, The Best of 1980-1990 and early demos.  War was released on 28 February 1983 and recently been re-released and digitally remastered on the 21 July 2008.

BOY

Flower power...

By cutting out the flowers from these gorgeous papers and lifting just part of them, it gives the card a lovely, delicate, floaty effect.  The butterflies have been hand glittered and layered to give the overall look that they are fluttering.

Rock around the clock....

Peel off stickers can give some amazing effects and here I've coloured them with glitter gel pens to give the a wonderful sparkly look to the dancers clothes.

Inside card

Front of card

All you need is love....

Using the same stamp as below but with different background papers and watercolouring the image, gives this card a completely different look.

Love is all around....

The "heart and flowers" stamp that I used on this card is such a beautiful and delicate image to work with and even when I've embossed the stamped image with gold embossing powder, none of the very fine detail has been lost. Also, what I personally love about crafting with stamps, is that by using different inks, different colours, different embossing powders, you never get the same look.  The slightest change will make the end result completely different.

On this card, after stamping and embossing the image onto cream cardstock, I then cut it out and using foam pads for dimension, layered it on some K and Company papers.  I used glossy accents to highlight some of the flowers together with small, gold gem stones and then finally, as a finishing touch I added a ribbon and small bell charm. Hope you like it....

Back to black...

Here, I've used gilding flakes to give a stunning contrast with the black background of the cardstock.  The image is then matted and layered using handmade papers.