I was hired by a young musician called Charlie Ardley to design an artist logo for him as well as header images for his social media.
As always, I started with the logo for Charlie Ardley because it’s a permanent thing that determines the style and colour range and I wanted to match everything else to it later on.
We discussed that he would like his initials to be the logo. My immediate thought was to turn the ‘A’ into a guitar head since he plays the guitar. First I made all the tuners look alike only to realise that it all comes across way too cartoony and flat. Then I modified them to look like silhouettes of tuners in real life and I was pleased with the slightly asymmetrical result.
Charlie said he wanted a rough looking logo that resembles the kind of music he plays and asked me to incorporate a burgundy colour somehow. I used effects of scratched glass and old photography and pulled layer over layer until I got the desired effect.
As for the header image, Charlie sent over a photo of himself and two of his guitars that I needed to extend sideways to achieve this panoramic shape that twitter, youtube, soundcloud and bandcamp requires. I basically pulled some images from the internet and built up the whole scene just like Dr. Frankenstein would. I used over 10 images I think, and just kept cloning, blending and adding effects until this rough, old photo like art work was born.
art from scratch 