THE BEGINNING

Creatures of Habit is a contemporary, death core metal band located out of Seminole, Florida. These guys contacted me for illustration and design work for their first full length release.

THE CONCEPT SKETCH

They had an open concept regarding a life theme incorporating a God tree and the Earth. I sketched up some concepts and elaborated while focused on this idea.

I pushed the tree and world to establish an environment within it. The first concept sketch (right) was focused on creatures evolving into a tree like form. This is the very first sketch that I sent to Creature’s of Habit for the Hyperion cover art.

The God tree now becomes the foundation for space and birth of new worlds and galaxies incorporating hidden alien like centipedes and individual life forms into one creature like organism.

Every preliminary sketch is different than my last and especially different from my usual hand drawn work in that sometimes there's not even a hint of much detail or color in it. This is because … each project is different and requires a different layout such as a map of where everything will be placed. So after I start digitally painting from a sketch it becomes more difficult to undo and start over after several hours of technical work has been applied to the finished project.

This is why I am a big fan of preliminary sketches when collaborating on a concept. If more time is allowed to plan out an idea first, it will help with the overall mapping of the finalized work

The guys wanted to embrace more universe like components into the concept so the finalized sketch isolating the world and capturing temperature further away from the fueling light source. I decided to treat this sketch more as a bottom layer of a painting.

BRANDING & VISUAL IDENTITY

The concept plays I huge part in this. The band wanted a darker color theme. I noticed further along the process, I was attracted to earth tone colors considering the theme and we decided to keep the colors this way so we could focus more on the aesthetic supporting the concept instead of just for looks. The band also sent me lyrics and music for inspiration.

When I started the cover art, I imagined the packaging & branding of the album complementing it by calling back to the life form for the cover art, but with a dark, vibrating, progressive twist to it. After, listening to their EP, I was blown away and specifically inspired by the track called Hyperion which was very fitting to the outcome of this project.. 

PROCESS

The best people to work with are the ones that support the creative process in all art forms. With this being said, I enjoyed working with these guys a lot because of our mutual respect for art.

Their music naturally fed my imagination to create the rest of this single celled life form for their cover art. I created a small video of the process behind the album artwork along with the music from Creature Of Habit’s song Hyperion: