This week Ghostly International is graciously featuring my work. I talked with the founder, Sam Valenti last week and think it is one of my better interviews. I thought I would show some never seen process work and talk about each for a bit.
This was an early sketch for the Subb-an release. I had been wanting to switch things up a bit and this was a great opportunity to do just that. I started doing very minimal pieces but felt that wasn’t pushing myself hard enough. I ended up using the golden mean to draw shapes from and divided a grid out to assemble this piece. From there it was refined into the final work.
Mark E was releasing a new single titled Orange. I had tons of unused previous work that I wasn’t worried about making something new, but thought it would be good to spend some time creating a piece that fit the title. I had this sketch I did for the cover and I went to the store and bought a blood orange to photograph. From there I started taking all the physical work that I had done and reassembling it, ripping it, whatever it took. I ended up with a couple hundred photos and this was one of the finals but it didn’t make the cut. Much too literal.
This was done for the previous single for Mark E. Now that I think about it, we may have used this as the digital cover, but the record graphics are quite different. This was a composite of different ideas for the cover, put into one.
Context was one of those records that I did a lot of moodboard and concepting before I even started on the piece, so I knew what I wanted to do right from the start. When I was working on the layout, I couldn’t decide weather to show the book or not to. I ended up not showing it, so this was one stage before the final edit. Earlier versions used scans from the book, etc for the back cover, which were instantly discarded.
I really struggled with this piece, I wanted something that was abstract but also somewhat in the fashion realm. The last cover I did for them was with Will Calcutt, who took the photo of Benoit and Sergio. For this one, I was on my own. I started with a typographic approach, which turned into an illustration approach, which ended up in frustration. I let this rest for a couple of days and it was due. So I started digging around in old photoshoots with John Klukas and started working with a lot of photos, highly manipulating them. I worked on this piece but the fern was killing the mood. I found another shot that didn’t have the fern and completed the piece in an hour.
The Pale Sketcher pieces consisted of doing everything manually then manipulating in the computer. I didn’t want the piece to look digital, so I did everything physically, knowing how I was going to manipulate. This was an early experiment that I forgot about.
This was originally done for Shigeto. I did tons of pieces for that album. Maybe 200. The Burning City painting was done for that cover as well. In the end, it didn’t feel right for the music and was canned. I was not really happy about that because I spent a lot of time on this. In the end, the final cover was way more appropriate.
Hopefully this shed some insight into my process and the background of the pieces. I want to thank you for support and readership. If you have any comments, would love to hear from you.