How do you go about your artwork?

[bulevardi]

Hi all !

How do you go about your artwork, or cover art, or images to display to promote or for your merch?

Do you do it all by yourself, independent, or do you outsource it to some other more graphical artist or your label or company?

When composing music, do you first have an idea of your visuals and album cover? And let that inspire you? Maybe it breaths a specific mood that needs to be heard in your music?
Or do you make the music first and then come up with a title, or artwork later on, that would hopefully fit the music?

Are there any particular forums for Graphic Design, aside KVR for music?

Lets discuss the graphical part of our music adventures!


Speaking for myself, I'm a bit into both here..

Before I worked in photography business, I also did some shoots for other artists long long time ago, and made cover artworks once too.
Then at the same time I was recording music that I just hold offline on my computer for years.
Later on I had some photos I thought I could use them as artworks, as if I had an album, started experimenting with this more and more.
And then a moment came I started re-recording the old stuff more to full songs and started to make images for each song, all in the same style and mood.
And so it started for me, mostly hand-in-hand.
For my later works I mostly had a full idea already long before, about how a photo should look, what needed to be in the picture, a whole schedule of how and when I would go shoot it. Sometimes the idea about the artwork was first or already made before the music.

If I do it the other way around, first starting with improvising music...I don't know the theme and title and artwork... It starts to make me doubt about everything even more. When I have some visual before me, it's a lot easier.

In the pandemic I started to draw a whole thing with Inkscape (my avatar is a detail of that). I had more time back then.
Right now I don't do artwork or shoots for others anymore, as it's too stressy and demanding, I can't see what the others have in mind, or I come up with things in my own style and the others want something else that I don't want to create. Oh well. I decided to work for myself then.

[whyterabbyt]

There's a recent 14-page thread about this already.... viewtopic.php?t=563810

[eLawnMust]

That one is more as to alternatives to adobe which there's TONs...

This one is more on target & also recent-

viewtopic.php?t=620024

[Effectsworks]

Affinity

[eLawnMust]

affinity is pretty good... I use ChaSys Draw IES it's a photoshop killer but also do 3d stuff in various prog then combine even sometimes use photoshop 5.5 (no, not CS5.5 but 5.5 from 1999)...

Sometimes also use Photoline, Photodemon, LView Pro (free now 32-64bit), Krita...

[bulevardi]

I'm using Rawtherapee and Gimp for photography and Inkscape for drawings.

Works pretty well.