The Story
Having had my way with the cover for his 2016 release, venice & beethoven, a few years later, with 80 spheres, I wanted to hark back to Andy’s 1999 release, dive, and mimic its large-logoed style, but with a sort of pop-art, Roy Lichtenstein-y-ish sensibility applied to it.
Andy's cover art that he created for his 1999 album, dive.
80 spheres is a blatant 80s-themed romp, so I wanted a brash, bright look to its cover instead of Andy’s muted and desaturated swimming pool water look. Bright red against blue strobes so nicely, which I really like, and I felt that striking dual colorway fit with the idea behind Andy’s riff on 80s music that the album is all about. I brought out one of my orbs (I created dozens of these colored orbs decades ago and use them all the time—see the bright teal one in the art for The Complete Wrx of the Shlarb Trilogy for a recent example), and went crazy with it, like a modern Vaserely (name dropper!).
My first completed artwork for this album had Andy's 'faunch' logo in dark blue, to sort of meld with the blue in the background, and maybe flirt with the viewer, but when we printed the CDs, the logo didn’t just meld in— it completely disappeared into the background! Bad news. So, we redid the covers with the logo in white, which saved the day (and is even more striking).
The failed 'blue on blue' version of the cover art. There's no reason at all that that logo shouldn't have really POPPED against the blue in the background when printed, right?... RIGHT? I really liked it, but it just didn't work. Ah well... live and learn. *_*
FINAL:
Done. /\/\
