It was a pleasure to create an illustration for a music album cover earlier this year. It was a watercolor painting designed specifically for musician and songwriter Scott Siskind's latest album called Old Ghosts, New Homes.
"We just keep pushing these Old Ghosts into new homes and pretend they haven’t been there before” - the thought of carrying negative things from your past and forcing them to fit into your new life without ever having dealt with them. That, and Scott's memories of growing up in a Jewish family that migrated from Eastern Europe to the states a long time ago where the main shaping factors that influenced the theme of the cover.
"We just keep pushing these Old Ghosts into new homes and pretend they haven’t been there before” - the thought of carrying negative things from your past and forcing them to fit into your new life without ever having dealt with them. That, and Scott's memories of growing up in a Jewish family that migrated from Eastern Europe to the states a long time ago where the main shaping factors that influenced the theme of the cover.
I spend ages trying to get my voice not to sound crap on record, and after a while I finally managed to record a bit of narration to go with my process video. If you prefer photographic evidence instead - keep scrolling!
It started with creating two cover design roughs based on Scott's sketches.
We decided to go for the one with that circular motion representing a particular person's
We decided to go for the one with that circular motion representing a particular person's
time and memory loop (the one on the right).
I traced the digital sketch onto watercolor sheet using a lightbox and continued with
creating red watercolor outlines of every object in the composition.
Stage two - adding some flat colour to the outlines,
trying to stick to a warm reddish palette as requested by the client.
Yellow wash added to the entire painting.
Then - more colour. more detail, more outlines.
Then - more colour. more detail, more outlines.
Aaaaand - done! After this it's going through the stages of scanning
and PS rendering to get the colours just perfect.
