Music Cover Artwork 001 — Medusa
About project
I am a product designer. My job is to design interfaces and research. It’s a very systematic job with little creativity.
To keep my creative skills and flexibility of thinking, I came up with art challenges for myself. For example: draw 100 covers of music albums (yes, really 100). Quality doesn’t matter. Otherwise you could be stuck in the first stage forever. Perhaps someone will find my approach useful. That is why I decided to share this experience.
To help myself, I come up with a key word. For example: night. And the first ten drawings are based on this theme. This cuts down on procrastination time. I think you know very well what fear of a clean slate is.
Finding associations for the word night is easy. These are: stars, space, aliens, the moon, and more. And you don’t have to think much about the color scheme. As a rule, these are dark shades and bright lines.
Screenshots of the process
The tool is also important. Preferably, it should be intuitive if you are not a professional illustrator. I use Procreate: you can create graphics of any complexity with it. But thanks to the great UX it’s quite easy for beginners.
I don’t use AI to generate ideas. Because the goal is to improve personal level of creative thinking, not to train a neural network. I have nothing against this technology, but it loses the sense of challenge.
Next: hours of practice drawing weekly. And don’t try to do something perfectly. Let it all depend on your mood.
I understand that my work looks weak compared to that of a real artist. But I don’t aspire to be one. As a designer, this kind of training helps me to develop my creative thinking and apply it in different areas.
Who knows, maybe one of the hundreds of covers I drew will decorate someone’s real music album.
