How do you go about your artwork?

[bulevardi]

Hi all !

How do you go about your artwork, or cover art, or images to display to promote or for your merch?

Do you do it all by yourself, independent, or do you outsource it to some other more graphical artist or your label or company?

When composing music, do you first have an idea of your visuals and album cover? And let that inspire you? Maybe it breaths a specific mood that needs to be heard in your music?
Or do you make the music first and then come up with a title, or artwork later on, that would hopefully fit the music?

I was looking for a similar forum for Linux Photographers, but that doesn't exist yet... well yeah, for each software there is a separate forum somewhere, but now I discovered https://pixls.us/ where a lot of open source graphic programs are bundled together... although the forum is not so known or active it seems.

Lets discuss the graphical part of our music adventures!

[krosancolossus]

I generally outsource it to someone who's got better taste than me! Sometimes it'll be a phone camera picture I took that I like, that I'll edit a little to make it a little lower quality. Music is always first though, I've never been much good at writing music to match a visual

[bhilmers]

Do you do it all by yourself...

I do it myself, and I used to do art/video for friends and acquaintances, but since image diffusion models are good I've lost all that work. Everyone I know that used to pay me for art just uses AI now. Surprisingly, people just don't care that much about art.

[bulevardi]

I'm into both.
Before I worked in photography business, I also did some shoots for other artists long long time ago, and made cover artworks once too.
Then at the same time I was recording music that I just hold offline on my computer for years.
Later on I had some photos I thought I could use them as artworks, as if I had an album, started experimenting with this more and more.
And then a moment came I started re-recording the old stuff more to full songs and started to make images for each song, all in the same style and mood.
And so it started for me, mostly hand-in-hand.
For my later works I mostly had a full idea already long before, about how a photo should look, what needed to be in the picture, a whole schedule of how and when I would go shoot it. Sometimes the idea about the artwork was first or already made before the music.

If I do it the other way around, first starting with improvising music...I don't know the theme and title and artwork... It starts to make me doubt about everything even more. When I have some visual before me, it's a lot easier.

In the pandemic I started to draw a whole thing with Inkscape (my avatar is a detail of that). I had more time back then.
Right now I don't do artwork or shoots for others anymore, as it's too stressy and demanding, I can't see what the others have in mind, or I come up with things in my own style and the others want something else that I don't want to create. Oh well. I decided to work for myself then.

[tavasti]

This far I've just picked some picture I've taken before. And to be honest, I would have plenty of insane differently mangled pictures from my own experimentations. For example, in darktable ask it to make HDR from totally different raw images results sometimes pretty intresting stuff. So my problem is that I can't make enough releasable music to use all cover artwork material I have done

[tkmusic]

I mostly do it myself. Sometimes I come up with something based on the theme of the album, but most of the time I just experiment and see what comes out.
Examples:
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