"Winter" Cd cover design

So a few months ago my dad told me he was recording a new EP to be released sometime around christmas. For the past few years I have dont the artwork for all of his CD's along with doing a bit of backing singing on various tracks which is always quite hilarious! 

 My parents took a trip to Alaska and a lot of the lyrics were inspired by that, one song in particular was about sitting outside with a glass of whisky looking at the night sky. I decided this was a pretty good visual so I decided to run with that. 

I wanted the image to use flat perspective with a lot of pattern and strong shapes. Here is a bit of my research looking at fantastical Illustration and book art - the Never Ending Story cover is my favourite!

I used a thick italic fountain pen for most of my sketching. Most of my linework is usually done with thin Rotring fineliners but I wanted the drawing to be quite rough and rugged and this pen gave more of that effect.

I drew the figure on an Adirondack style chair, I sat on a lot of these chairs in my time in New York and they take me back to that feeling of being out in the countryside surrounded by trees and beautiful forest landscapes. 

I wanted to create a patterned border to frame the piece as I have always loved illustrations with borders like this but I have never tried to create one myself.

Setting up my "studio" on our kitchen table to start the final artwork.

Inking up the pencil line

Getting to the final stages

This is the finished artwork after I had added pencil shading for depth. 

For the typography I sat for an evening and ruined my wrist everything using my glass dip pen in a simple font style. It hurt but I enjoyed the effect once it was finished.

I then had to scan it all in to be digitally coloured and edited together. The final CD arrived this week yayyyy!

I used the same border and elements from the main image in the inside and reverse cover so it all linked together and I put the trees on the main CD because I liked the shapes they made (plus I love pattern so I hate empty space...). Let me know what you think of this, has anyone else done any CD art they would like to share? I will put a link to the tracks when they are online which should be soon!