Sometimes, there are cover that are not that work intense, because they are based on another person’s artwork. Whilst the part of creating a scenery has already been accomplished, there is still the problem of how to integrate one’s own style into that of said person? How to arrange fonts in a work that wasn’t meant to carry any captions? These were interesting problems to investigate for us and in the end, none of the drafts we originally planned to use for Fabio Keiner’s Abstract Cello album survived.

The original artwork is by Czech rendering artist Eva Kmentova, who kindly permitted the usage of her image as a base for the cover. As you can easily recognise, this is a rather prominent motive that almost allows no further addition. That is, it just pushes them aside like they have never existed at all. So what we did in the end was to pick up an attractive section of the original image, use it as a 2:1 ratio canvas (following Marco’s approach he had used for the next Synflict album that hasn’t even been composed yet), and make sparse use of captions. As a novelty, I completely removed the Petcord logo and catalogue number from the front, since there was no way of integrating them without destroying the fragile balance of the two other captions.

The back was easier to accomplish though another rather tough problem to solve: As it needs to carry quite a lot information some space for text is needed, but hard to find on an image like Eva Kmentova’s. So I came up with an idea I lifted from old 4AD covers and gradually bleached out the colours. I think, it’s quite nice to look at, but of course I prefer works that I can determine from ground up. Fortunately, the next two covers in line are such completely free works. But it was a useful experience anyway.