Album artwork for “Imagining Places You’ve Never Been”
This is my friend Lasse Mørck. We went to school together. When we were children we used to draw monsters every day. We called it “THE MONSTER WAR”. We must have drawn over a thousand monsters before we moved on to playing football and chasing girls.
I never really stopped drawing and over time got decent at it. At some point, Lasse picked up a contrabass and got really good. He ended up studying it at the Rhytmic Music Conservatory (RMC) in Copenhagen and La Facultad de Música de la Universidad Veracruzana in Mexico.
When it was time for Lasse to put out his first album he remembered the boy he used to draw monsters with and asked me if I wanted to do the artwork. I was honored and of course, said yes.
We first met up at a café and talked about his concept for the album and the ideas he had for the artwork. The album was gonna consist of compositions about places all over the world, that Lasse had not yet visited but wanted to or which mood inspired him. He wasn’t sure about the title of the album or the complete tracklist yet but he wanted the artwork to reflect the different places the music referenced.
I asked Lasse to find some images that he liked the mood of and that could symbolize the different tracks or give me inspiration in any other way. This is what he came up with:
After that, I did a quick sketch of what I was thinking for the artwork. At this point, I was really pushing for the title to be “Excursions”. Yes, that’s a reference to “A Tribe Called Quest”.
Lasse approved of the sketch and decided on the final track list and title of the album. The album was gonna be called “Imagining Places I’ve Never Been”. I did the final drawing. First in red pencil and then in black pen over the pencil.
I then scanned in the drawing. Removed the red pencil and vectorized the pen to scale it up to fit print.
After that, it was time to add some color. The colors are based on the images Lasse chose from the mood. I also wanted them to have some naivety to them, because of me as Lasse’s childhood history and the imagination in the concept.
This is what I presented to Lasse. He liked it.
We then spent a long time going back and forth, setting up the text, changing little things here and there and finally Lasse decided it was too light and he did not like the background. So I came up with this:
And after some more tinkering, the album was finally ready.
