Mark Refoy from Slipstream has to be one of the most easy going clients of all time, his briefs are a real pleasure to deconstruct, here's a sample:
"Something not fashionable but alluring - the thought that something very far away is doing what it has to do regardless of outside interference. Also myself and Jonny were literally jettisoned from the orbit of Spiritualized, by fault or design is irrelevant now, so there is that link. I like some of Damien Hirst's ideas that I saw in a programme about him lately but to be honest I haven't got a particular idea for an image."
I'll admit that I did panic a bit when I read the reference to Hirst, but it gave me an understanding of the kind of feel they wanted for the art, it was a great starting point and pushed the ideas to somewhere I didn't think we'd end up.
As with my last Slipstream piece, I began by looking at scientific diagrams and found a beautiful illustration of the layers of the earth's atmosphere. I tried lots of cheats to bring the original piece up to resolution, but it just wasn't big enough to sustain being potentially printed at 12inches. So, in the end I started to redraw it layer by layer, piece by piece. It turned out to be a pretty big job, it's hard to create concentric circles, cut the way they are in the illustration, but eventually I got to a point where the form of the diagram roughly resembled the original.
The next challenge was getting some texture and variety into it, I started by off-setting the same layer of the diagram on top of it's self to try and create some printers off-set, then I used some grunge textures and hand blocked some colour into certain areas.
The finished result has a great look, I'm really happy with the energised 50's feel of the colours, and I love having copy on the cover that isn't the track names. It's a great collection as well, I don't have a release date at the time of writing this, but it's going to be a digital only release (massive shame, I'm trying to get them to do a physical release, even offered to waive my fee to help fund it) on Disonic sometime this year.
You can see Volume 2 here and the full illustration here.
