Before I get into this, I would just like to say that I am no authority on this, or anything else for that matter. I just want to share my experience, and if you have found a better way of doing things I’d love to know so I can make my own life easier!
My music is very personal to me. I know everyone says that but it’s true for us all so I’m saying it again. I write the lyrics for my songs on my own pretty much all of the time and they’re often based on my life or on something I’ve seen, a film or a friend’s story. Either way they’re my thoughts and feelings on a situation. Because of this I had this idea that I wanted the cover to be my own, that I wanted to make something for it, do it myself so that it can properly represent the music and the thoughts and all of those things.
To be more specific I wanted to paint or draw the covers. Now this didn’t quite work out the way I wanted it to, and next time I might come up with a different concept, or maybe try and follow through on this idea.
I started with the idea of a wine glass, I wanted to add water colour to it so I mixed some paint to close to a wine colour, which is difficult because I’m not really a wine drinker. The song, if you haven’t heard it (you should obviously), is about someone only wanting you to forget, only wanting you till ‘last call’, until home time and the drinking stops. I tried for a long time to paint this fallen over wine glass with wine spilled everywhere. I got to the point where I really wanted to do anything other than paint this cover art but it needed doing so I sat and continued trying.
The thing that ended up catching my eye and inspiring everyone was actually when I got so bored I picked up the wine glass I was using as a reference and put it down in the paint and then on the paper, creating a circle on the page.
I took this to my father after sitting and making stains on the paper for about an hour. We ended up using the first one, typical. He worked some Photoshop magic, adding linen texture to the background and making it less plain white so it was less stark. We added text, the name of the song and my own name, in my handwriting. I tried to make a font to do this but it has turned out to be easier for me to just write it out and for us to scan that in.
Obviously everyone is different and you might want to do this in a completely different way. I don’t particularly want to do it exactly like this next time as it took a long time and was very stressful. The key, I think, is to have a really strong concept that you’re happy with. The problem really was that I wasn’t 100% happy with my own concept which meant executing it in a way that made me happy was incredibly difficult.
All streaming/download links are available on my Music page.