MidwestLove Art & Design

Over the last year or so I’ve gotten to play a handful of shows with and get to know Zach Pietrini and the members of his band, The Broken Bones, an awesome Americana-flavored folk rock ensemble from the northern Chicago area. Formed around the songwriting chops of Zach, the latest incarnation of the band consists mostly of the members of the now defunct Ammi, another great band that I used to hang around and play shows with. For what it’s worth, I hope that my friends never stop making music. I don’t know what I’d do with myself.

Anyway, The Bones wanted this release to evoke an organic, illustrated and woodsy feel, which is totally appropriate for their sound. My wife (and fellow Venna band mate) Heather was asked to sing back up vocals on this project, so I was fortunate enough to hear the songs from their rough demo stage to the final mixes. Being so familiar with the project gave me a good sense of what to do with their packaging. I definitely wanted to give it little more character apart from the standard brown paper bag your average folk-rock tends to come in. Apparently to me, that means anthropomorphic mice and snails marching their way through a thicket.

The final product was the result of a few different ideas that culminated into a number of sketches, most of which ended up getting thrown out. The project really only started taking shape once the band settled on the title The Bright and Shining Lights: of Anywhere Else. I ended up sketching out the main front cover foliage as one drawing. I then inked each “layer” of foliage sperately on tracing paper and then scanned and layered them in Illustrator. The individual layers were then digitally painted in Photoshop. Phil of The Bones put it best when he described it as having a Don Bluth-ish quality (a fantastic compliment by the way… thanks, Phil). It actually does remind me of The Secret of Nimh, which was an unintentional but definitely welcome outcome.

Here’s the full outside Digipac & full process disc face-

These are being printed up by the always reliable Sooper Dooper up in Madison, WI. They do a great job and I can’t wait to get these back.

Leave me some comments… let me know what you think!

-marky

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 at 20:12 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.