Sortaja - Album Cover Art

Sortaja didn't give me much direction with this and originally when we threw some ideas, I was going in completely different directions. The original idea was to do some H.R Giger inspired landscape, but I could get it to work how I was originally planned so I suggested an idea inspired by the human batteries from the Matrix. This was also something that I had ideas on how to animate it for the background visuals as well.

With Matrix as the basic source for the inspirations, I took it to a more cyberpunkish style than horror as my original sketch was. Everything began by drawing a baby that I first found pretty hard to do because I'm used to drawing only adults. There's something on a child's anatomy that is really hard to get a grip on, so I mostly followed stock art as a reference for the basic character. After I finally got the baby done, I started adding elements to it. First I kinda went way too far and the baby started looking like a robot rather than a human, so I rewatched some Matrix and realized that human batteries didn't really have anything other than the cables back of their heads. That made me scrap most of the cybernetics and all the cool things I had spent hours drawing in.

After I had scrapped most of the content I had already drawn I decided to try and add some colors and circuit board texture to the background. I tried to find a good stock pattern for it, but couldn't find any so I grabbed my phone and took a picture from my old motherboard that was just laying around. I think it worked really great at first but then decided that it wasn't clean enough. So I continued searching and finally found good enough stock vectors that I could use.

Unfortunately, this album never got printed so it's just a digital cover now, but at least I got to use the elements for Bandcamp headers and such as well and not just the album cover.

Overall I love making anything cyberpunk or horror-themed and I would love to make more of this type of projects. Most of my illustration commissions are portraits that are in most cases private projects so I can't really share them publically.