Kaela Rowan – The Fruited Thorn – Album cover design

This album cover design was a very collaborative effort. Kaela found the picture of the Raven on the inside of the album on the internet. Very ably captured by Tom Spross this image formed the backbone of the visual inspiration for the artwork. The photo on the album cover was taken by Douglas Robertson and my job was to embellish and skew these images with illustrations, detailed editing and colour treatments. If you look at the GIF at the bottom you will see the various iterations of the cover design I went through and as usual I took things to extremes. See if you can spot the version that was used :)  As you can see the development process took me to quite an abstract, mordernist outcome, what we chose ended up falling somewhere in the middle of this process. As an artist you nearly always plump for the last thing, I am aware however that nobody else can ever share my protracted perspective and the cover came out great regardless of me leading myself down the garden path. Currently I seem to be exhibiting a propensity to geometrically simplify everything. It's an urge, I can't explain it and frankly I don't feel the need too. Creativity is a strange property, it comes in waves, often randomly and with no or little conscious control. What you see here is the distillation of this process and not the raw result of it. When an imaginative urge strikes me I tend to chase it, it's a mystical quantity and one that is always compelling and worth pursuing. Like an surfer seeking the perfect wave, a mountain biker looking for the perfect singletrack or the astro physicist looking for a black hole. There is no functional need to pursue these things and in fact when a creative urge takes my on a trip it often ends up being discarded and only slightly influencing the final product. This is totally cool, this is the design process and I love it. I think what we ended up here is great and suits the music very well, Kaela is singing beautiful songs here, delicately rendered with mostly acoustic instruments sensitively arranged. So to portray her as some sort of techno saint is probably pushing the boat out a bit.Go and check the her website out and download a pre-release copy. It's pure guid! Hard Copy release date is August 5th.http://www.kaelarowan.net/via GIPHY