Sol Right

No, it's not your imagination, I've returned to make a post.  It's like Christmas in December!  No excuses, and if I'm honest posts are generally going to be few and far apart for a while longer yet (though I'm hoping to do another before the New Year - we'll see how that goes).  That said, I haven't been doing much in the way of art either, so it's not like I have much to post.  Eventually I'll get to explaining why, but it's going to be a while yet before I can.

OK, so this post is tangential to the Philip Sandifer cover posts, because Phil introduced me to Alex, of the group Seeming.  I have to admit I'd never previously heard of them, but after looking them up they're really good.  Not entirely to my taste, if I'm honest, but I enjoyed what I was listening to well enough, which is impressive for me as I'm a right stick in the mud when it comes to music.

So I did an Album cover!  Well, that's not true; I did a small part of an album cover that was laid out by somebody else - but there is an album, called SOL, and my work is on the cover (huzzah!).  It's a good album too - I'll put how you can buy ot at the bottom of this post.

So that's the album.  The bit I did is in the square on the front cover.  I've never done a cover before, so I wasn't sure how the thing worked - I'm more used to doing the covers for Phil, where I do the design and the art and the whole deal, but that isn't the case here, except I didn't know that until near the end, so I kept being dumb and adding a logo to things where no logo was needed, like a newbie (which of course, I am).

So, anyway, Phil introduced me to Alex, who commissioned the cover.  I went about it the usual way, by giving a number of idea thumbnails to choose from.  See, logos on all of them.  Alex gave me an inspiration board to get an idea of the style he was after, and it was chock full of 1960's book covers.  This was terrible, I've never done a 1960's style book cover in my...  Oh, no, wait, I totally have!  So that was convenient!

Alex ended up picking one of the ones I liked the most (5's design, but not those colours), though I was a little sad he didn't pick 4 or 16, since I really liked those too, but in retrospect they were perhaps furthest from the stuff on the inspiration board, so that's understandable.  It also means I can use something similar for something else, what with my liking them and all.

Anyway, Alex wasn't keen on the human figure (it's small - you'll need to squint), and suggested I try for an animal that didn't belong in the desert, such as an elk.  Fine by me.

One elk later, with a bunch of polar bears and colour schemes to be on the safe side.  I made my preference larger, but I was pretty happy with all of them.  '#2,' said Alex, so that was pretty easy.

Since the front was pretty much clear from that response, I went and did some ideas for the back.  Obviously, you can see from the image of the actual album that none of them were eventually used - the rear illustration is not mine.  I'm A-OK with that, though I did like the idea of the front and back matching. They're here for the sake of completeness.  Alex liked 5 and 6, so I took that through to final without the text.

I also supplied this sheet with some alternative options for the treatment of the sun and dialing in the colours.  He picked one, and requested some further colour changes. Mostly making things darker - presumably for a moodier atmosphere.  From there I just had to make the full size cover, which since it was pretty graphic in nature, and I'd been using a few paths for the thumbnails, went fairly quickly.

And here is the final artwork for the rear and Front (though as discussed, only the front got used).  All in all this went pretty 'quickly' and pleasantly, except both myself and Alex were pretty busy at the time, so while there were few emails to reach the final result, it took several weeks to get there.

Alas, it has taken me far, far to long to write this post, but I'm sure any purchases of the album this inspires would still be appreciated (not by me, since I've been paid, but by the chap who was nice enough to commision me).  Seeming also has a more recent  EP out, which it wouldn't hurt to take a look at.

You can get the album on Digital, Vinyl or CD from This Link.