Don’t take that tone with me

Ever since I was a kid, I was turned on by album art… Those great album covers of the past (Zep - Physical Graffiti, Kiss- Rock and Roll Over and Triumph - Just a Game are a few of my favorites) were like a window into a new world for me. It was because of a TV ad for a record store in Shreveport, Louisiana, that I began my musical and artistic journey. The album covers started hitting the screen and I was blown away. I made my dad take me to the record store and I bought a Kiss album. It was all over.

I decided I wanted to be a guitarist. And I wanted to make album covers. Both came true. I get the pleasure of creating art for some great musicians, most of which are up-and-coming. The latest projects I’ve completed are an album cover for new artist Andy Eppler and a website for country music hall-of-famer Johnny Lee.

Andy is a fantastic singer-songwriter I met while teaching at South Plains College. He has one of the best voices I’ve ever heard and is a massively prolific writer. He even decided to release 6 albums in 6 months once… and he did. They were home-done jobs, but the fire was there.

I had the pleasure of recording Andy for some of his latest CD and I did his cover. Here are some samples of the art we went with. By the way, you can find him on iTunes or visit his site to purchase his CD.

I ended up using about 150 layers in Photoshop on the outside of the booklet. Each photo (taken by my Chief Engineer Ben Mercado) had to be knocked out (they were originally on a black background) and was heavily treated. Ben took the photos at multiple angles which allowed my to place Andy in the depth of field easily.

The photos were taken outdoors and the sunlight washed them out a little. I used color burn, screen and multiply, along with various levels of opacity to create a stark, vintage, Pink Floydian look for the photos.

Here is a sample of what I did in Photoshop for those of you who like to look at how I treated the layers: Andy’s photo layers.

The background came from a painting Andy had done that we took a photo of when it was backlit by sunlight. That allowed us to capture a greater amount of brush strokes. We took the picture in my dining room. Then I altered the color.

I added the dirt from a photo of a West Texas road. The flower pots actually sit in front of my studio. And that was it. About 40 hours later we had a cover. To see more of my work, visit my gallery. Peace.

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