How I designed Nathan Roche's new record cover

Last year Nathan Roche asked me to do the artwork for his new LP Drink Up, Rainforest Sinatra. It has finally been announced by the record label Gone With The Weed, and will be out April 2nd 2021.

Drink Up, Rainforest Sinatra LP by Nathan Roche

I thought it could be interesting to show some of the process work in creating this artwork. Nathan sent me a demo of the album and told me his brief was simply "Tropical North Queensland meets France".

I started collecting images to form the feeling for the cover. I made a mood board on Pinterest.

My idea was to have a tropic rainforest overtake the city of Marseille. So I chose a pretty main part of the city and did this sketch.

I then refined the drawing and converted it to black.

Then it was time to fill in the colour.

Then the illustration was done and it was time to move onto InDesign and design the typography and layout of the record.

Nathan provided some photographs by Belinda Sherriff for the labels and back cover.

Photograph's by Belinda Sherriff

I chose the the typeface Artigo Display from Adobe Fonts for it's unusual personality. I felt it really related to the music.

Then I laid out the front and back and the labels.

I then sent off a proof to Nathan and the label and it was approved. The final step was making the print ready final files with trim and fold lines and supplying them as PDFs.

And here is the final product:

Front Cover of Drink Up, Rainforest Sinatra LP by Nathan Roche

Back Cover of Drink Up, Rainforest Sinatra LP by Nathan Roche

Front Cover of Drink Up, Rainforest Sinatra LP by Nathan Roche

Back Cover of Drink Up, Rainforest Sinatra LP by Nathan Roche

Artwork by: Matt Limmer.