Tribal Blood

Here's another cd cover I created recently. David Antony Clark is a local composer and audio engineer who has released a number of albums in the neo-primal genre, several of which I have created artwork for.

In this release he has combined his neo-primative grooves with Maori singing and chanting written and performed by Rawiri Toia, a lecturer in Maori issues at Victoria University. The lyrical content explores the feelings and experiences of the first Polynesians who arrived in Aotearoa/New Zealand around one thousand years ago.

I like this cover. It's distinctly Maori, but doesn't feel cliched. I chose to use the oft-used Trajan font for the subtitles as it adds an air of historical authority and makes it feel like a bit of a museum piece.

I just heard yesterday that this album has been accepted for release by a world music distributor in Germany, so this week I need to make a new version with new barcodes and logos etc for that market.

Previous albums I have designed for David include 'Shaman Dancing' and 'Songs of Magic, Sex and War', both of which are featured in my gallery. Also check out his website, where you can hear audio excepts from all of these and more.

C-23 // Tessellation 1

I'm doing a bit of self-directed study into symmetry and tessellating patterns at the moment. I know it sounds kinda masochistic, but I'm really enjoying it. I guess it's expanding on the stuff I like to do with graph paper, plus an opportunity to explore some mathematical aspects of art and design, and an excuse to play with Adobe Illustrator.

I'm working out of an excellent book called 'Designing Tessellations' by Jinny Beyer. So far I've mostly been photocopying sheets of tiles out of the book, cutting them out and sticking them into an exercise book in various ways that demonstrate different kinds of 2-D symmetry. But today I decided to apply some of what I've learned so far and build something in Illustrator. After a couple of false starts, here's the result. I like the way the gradient fill I've used on the tiles creates a kind of psuedo 3-D effect.