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as with a lot of things i do , i get inspiration for new cover art or design from almost everything i do , whether it be games , music , video , literally anything . though , given a lot of my graphic design work is cover art , my biggest source of inspiration is the cover art and visual aesethtic of music i like . a good example is Jane Remover's frailty
cover art and promotional content . i've always had fascination with things of of low visual fidelity - and when frailty came out , i was incredibly attatched to the album , and the visual style constantly influenced me subconciously . that super grainy style , the low bitrate and lossy audio , it all forms this feeling of a memory you can't fully remember anymore , digitalized into this blocky , distorted mess and i love that . frailty & Jane's older side projects definitley inspired the beginnings of my visual style , and any hints of noise and jpeg compression u see me using probably comes from that .
the next thing that gave me a lot of inspiration was the games i was playing . it's hard to name a specific source , as it was moreso a huge combination of the games i was playing but Half-Life 2 , other source games , and fanmade source horror content like Anomidae's Interloper series definitley had some effect . the source engine's capicity to feel so bleak and empty along with it's realistic yet dirty textures created a super unqiue atmosphere , and i've found myself trying to emulate that atmosphere and trying to use similar assets to the ones used in Half-Life , the "17" cover art in the showcase section shows that off best i think . Along with source , games like Cruelty Squad and Inscryption definitley inspired my visual style in a couple ways . Cruelty Squad inspired me to be more abstract and harsh with my visual design , and a lot of the aliased and pixelized text usage that can be seen in my cover art is inspired from Inscryption's title screen . during this era of inspiration , Ultrakill's PSX color compression + dithering settings also definitley inspired me a lot , leading to my almost constant use of dithering and color compression .
the most recent update to my artsyle came after the release of Syzy's album , The weight of the world
. this quickly became my favorite album , as i had been waiting for it for years . a lot of syzy's alt account music and album teasers included unicode symbols like stars , which was something i rlly liked , causing me to use those on my own . eventually , i stumbled upon ascii dot art like the dot art i use in my newer cover art , and combined with the aliased pixelizaed style i had been using up to that point , it quickly became a staple . also , all the star symbols accross my cover art and logo were directly inspired by TWOTW's cover art .
i use paint.net to make all of my visual art . given that most of my art is made via image manipulation , combining assets i've made from other assets , paint.net works perfectly for me. i use a variety of plugins but i've been getting a lot of use out of this jpeg effect plugin as of late . a favorite of mine is also the built in "quantize" effect in the color section , it's how i get all those sweet color compressed and dithered effects .
i find it hard to force myself to make art , and that's true for any medium . with visual art , i feel like it all has to come natrually . i never have an idea of what the ifnal image will look like in my head . i just put things down and add something in whenever i get a cool idea . the cover art for "HOW TO GROW A FOURTH" arm was orignally VERY different - being plain black & white and going for more of an "old early 2010s cd you found in some dingy alley" look . conistently though , i think backround image , color compression & pallete choice comes first , then comes text , then comes extra detail , like the ascii art . it's not always consistent though , i just try to make sure im doing something fun and eye catching .