I’ve been contacted by a London-based musician, Mark Anthony to design his upcoming album cover ‘Reckless Caution’.
He sent me two reference pictures: one was a portrait painted with runny pastel colours and the other one was a graffiti-kind of image that had a dark underground feel to it. He wanted his portrait on the cover as well as London landmarks.
First I was excited for the challenge but then I didn’t know how I could show more than one London scene without turning the cover into a billboard. I decided to let future-Eniko deal with that problem and started to paint the portrait hoping that everything will sort itself out as I go.
Mark wanted the portrait to be pop artsy so I went ahead and started to paint it using colours that didn’t agree with my perfectionist mind’s idea about how a portrait should look like. It was actually a relief not having to make a hyper realistic painting but a surreal one in high contrast that looks almost unfinished. I actually had to fight the urge to fix the imperfections.
After that I sketched the landmarks with a thin isograph pen. I scanned everything and just placed the buildings around Mark’s portrait. I was happy to see that even when my ideas let me down, I just need to get the ingredients ready and they will sort themselves out.
Regarding the lettering I just knew that I didn’t want to do the regular ‘artist on the top, album name on the bottom’ scenario. I just needed a character to divide Mark Anthony from Reckless Caution and my first try was a dot which then resulted the REC- sign by a coincidence I did not see coming. It made me giggle when it happened.
If you want to check out Mark’s website you can do so by following the link below:
art from scratch 