Artwork for DigiPak + Insert Artwork: Textures

Artwork is an essential part of selling albums due to human nature of visual judgement and first impressions. The genre of music that I have selected has an artistic approach to cover art and inserts, where certain photographers and illustrators in the industry will be extremely valued for artistic companionship to work on an album.

The photographer/graphic designer that I have chosen for inspiration for my album's visual artwork is Leif Podhajsky, who has a long list of bands in his network, including Tame Impala, Foals, The Vines, Lykke Li, Gypsy & The Cat, Shabazz Palaces, Young Magic, Toy and The Horrors. Podhajsky's style is unique looking at mirrored images, cosmic landscapes, rippling and waving effects. This abstract style will work well with the nature of my video and conform to the conventions of the genre. Podhajsky often considers textures in his work, where we can see and almost feel the image.

These images come from Podhajsky's 
artwork on two Tame Impala singles taken from their latest album Lonerism, the one pictured right is the artwork for the single 'Feels Like We Only Go Backwards' and the one on bottom left of this paragraph is the single 'Elephant'. Both images are similar in sense that they have a visual similarity. The image for 'Elephant' looks like an emulsion of colour, similar to that of The XX's Coexist artwork (pictured left) where it shows the coloured emulsion of two liquids, however the image for Elephant has had significantly more manipulation with a more vivid colouring.  These bright colours conform to the genre of Tame Impala which is Neo-Psychedelic Rock; a niche genre that is growing significantly with Tame Impala's success. The artwork for 'Feels Like...' takes another approach of texture with a more look of tree roots yet still being ambiguous and subtle with the actual definitive structure of what it is.

Another band that Podhajsky works with is The Horrors, recently collaborating to create this limited edition box set titled 'Higher' for some singles from their latest album Skying (As pictured right). Podhajsky also uses a prominent texture on each of these singles, simply only a picture of this individual texture on a single one of the vinyl sleeves.

Looking back at the Foals digiPak, we can see how their discs have used a unique texture of the constant colour blue as a motif discussed throughout the album, not only in the artwork of the album but the visuals of the music video and lyrics of their songs on the album, e.g 'Blue Blood' is the title of one of the tracks on the album. Use of vivid imagery and colours is a convention of artwork.


The mutual corresponding element between all these discs is the use of vivid colours and finishes to its manipulation to which I believe I would be able to achieve without the use of image manipulation software, yet using the vibrant colouring of food colours. I wish to use this unique emulsion texture as a part of my digiPak, possibly as an effect used on the background of the cover image or as part of an insert, however I have other ideas for inserts to my booklet.

This is the image I took of the food colours as described above. As we can see, I used the three main colours constant throughout the music video: blue, red and green - each representing a character within the video. This colouring would be perfect to be the pattern printed on the disc in the digiPak. I will also edit the same image some how and make my digiPak a double disc digiPak with one of the discs having content such as the music video we are making on it and exclusive live footage. 

UPDATE (29th January 2013):
I used Photoshop to manipulate the above image in to two disc shapes that will include the album features as well as an additional disc for bonus features, as discussed. Here are the two discs: