Her Golden Whip EP Cover

Photo by Mateus Alves

Her Golden Whip is a Ska/Klezmer band out of Berlin that asked me to create a cover for their new EP “The Way They’re Dancing.” They emailed me a couple of photos, and admitted they didn’t have a very concrete idea of what it ought to look like, so they needed help to nail down a concept. We made an appointment to chat via Skype and discussed a number of different options for covers. I’ve been really psyched on the Urban Sketching style of watercolors, and it seemed like a style that could convey the kind of energy they were looking for, so we settled on a watercolor sketch based on a photo from one of their performances in Paris.

I brought my sketchpad to a couple of house shows in my neighborhood, trying to gather some poses and lighting options that would feel suitably dynamic.

Next I roughed in a very simple color scheme and design into a small watercolor pad that I sent to my contact in the band for assessment. Since they do a lot of busking and on-the-street performances, interactivity and personality are critical parts of their image, and something I wanted to be sure to capture, so I developed several head-shots for each of the members.

When they got back to me, they admitted that as long as I could get that level of detail, they wanted to show all the band members on the front cover, a potentially tricky composition. Working in photoshop, I selected images that I thought would harmonize, and composed them into a couple of simple designs for reference

I also decided that for the final image, I wanted to move away from the purple and yellow color scheme to a subtler gamut of dark blues and cool neutrals, balanced against illuminated oranges.
 The far left of the image (the back of the digipak case) needed to fade away, keeping so any lettering would be as clear as possible.

The first attempt was still too purple, and clumsy in execution, stiff and lacking energy. (Shown here compared with the 2nd version on top)

The final image in progress

The final cd case, with lettering mockup.