Take Flight - Album Artwork

When making this art, my first thought was that it had to be good value for money. This may seem like a strange thought, but when someone buys a CD off you, they aren't just buying the music, they're buying the sleeve too. The band and I discussed the idea of reflecting the overall values of the album which ultimately were: time, relationships and fun. The album has a sort of "scrapbook" feel to it, each song is different to the last both sonically and in terms of lyrical content. Some songs were written recently, and others from years in the past. I wanted to reflect all of these ideas in one big piece of art that would wrap around the CD digipak but also work as a digital 1:1 image on streaming services. 

I set about creating a collage that used the wealth of images I had amassed of the group over 2 years as well as photographs from our own personal archives. this included photos of the band from childhood to now. You can see several stories unfold in shots across the artwork: the band members getting more and more inundated with birds across the top of the image, Isaac and Will speaking to eachother on the phone in the centre (these two being a less than subtle reference to the name of the band) as well as the actual history of the band from start to finish from their earliest performances and photos to the album recording sessions and meetings with their new record label. There are also references to the band's flowery shirts that they wore during their first UK tour. 

I then created the inner gatefold artwork. I wanted to keep with the "scrapbook" theme but also introduce something new. The studio that the bulk of the album was recorded in was rather small compared to others in the UK, so I created a panoramic "doodle" that I wanted to convey what it was like to record the album. There was no actual panoramic photograph of the studio to work from, however there was lots of video. I stitched together several frames of video together to create a partial panorama, then used my imagination and memory to fill in the missing pieces. 

All of the art was created physically and then digitally enhanced for digital and CMYK printing.