Psychedelic art movement 

The psychedelic style was most prominent in the 60s and 70s, and makes sure of altered perspectives, hallucinogenic visuals and brightly coloured bizarre shapes. The style is inspired by the effects caused by the drug LSD, which was at its peak of use in the time of the style becoming popular. The style borrows elements from the surrealist, abstract and art nouveau movements, with its obscure themes, bold colours and decoritive calligrphic typography.   

Robert Beatty 

Robert Beatty is a psychedelic abstract graphic designer whose art is seen to be trippy and mystifying. He create a sense of nostalgia through his work by using old versions of photoshop and illustrator on a 10 year old computer, to create and aged and retro feel, going against traditional modern techniques. He makes use of 3D and 2D shapes and text, with gradients and soft colour tones and uses digital airbrushing to make his pieces feel dream like and to “evoke a weird sense of wonder”. I was inspired by his work with the psychedelic rock band Tame Impala, for their 2015 album Currents, and wanted to make a vinyl cover for a modern psychedelic band using the same techquinies that Beatty does. 

These are my first concepts for my vinyl cover design.

This was my first attempt at a psychedelic vinyl cover, which I wanted to be very experimental and free. I photoshopped a sliced banana to make it look as though it was infinate and made the slices curve around the page. I worked with a restricted colour palette of only around 5 colors. Once I established the layout of the banana I began to randomly place shapes while using 70s psychedelic rock albums and posters for inspiration.

This is my second attempt at a psychedelic cover, and possibly my final, which is based on the work of Robert Beattie, who worked with artists such as Tame Impala on his album ‘Currents’. I worked again with a restricted palette, but made them a lot softer and made use of gradients to add a dreamlike effect to the piece. I used abstract geometric shapes for the background, over lapping and adding shadows to them, and made use of the sliced banana graphic again, but this time edited the image to be duotone pink and yellow.