Hainbach - SYN-KET Studien: Part I

Last week I started working on this cover art for Hainbach, an electronic music composer. I'm a huge fan of his and have learned a whole lot about music production from his wonderful youtube channel so I was extremely excited when he came to me with a request for a cover for his new album.

The concept behind the record is this: While visiting the Museo Del Synth Marchigiano, a museum of old and rare early italian synthesizers he had the chance to spend a few sessions with the Syn-Ket a extremely rare instrument form the early 60's (only 8 units exist and only the one at the museum is functional) and so he recorded a album of these experimentations (or studies) .

As he was telling me about this over instagram chat the first thing I thought was that the syn ket should obviously be a key visual in the cover and the "studien" aspect in conjunction with the Italian connection made me think of a  classical study room. It's almost a cliché that a fancy study room must have a greco-roman style marble bust or statue and I liked the idea of pairing that with the syn-ket. The album's music is very minimalistic. Warm but mysterious so I thought about having a window with a view that had sort of the same "warm but mysterious" vibe. I quickly sketched the layout above and he loved it so boom! Off we go. It's nice when it's that easy.

Every element of the image is based on something related to his trip to the museum: the statue is from Sant'Elpidio a Mare, where the museum is located. The beer was his favorite, Ichnusa (just tried it the other day, pretty good!). The sunflower field was inspired by one of a view photos he sent me of the area.
As corny/ basic as it might be I like the idea of the window being a representation of exploring old places/ old instruments so I tried to compose the image in a way that it zig zags down the slope and up the far fields toward the horizon.

All in all a simple but effective concept, I think.
I drew each element very tightly and separately so I could play around with the placement including a few separate sunflowers for the forefront. Pretty time intensive work but worth the effort as it least to as close to perfect a layout as I can muster.
At some point i start merging layers though. Otherwise I'll never stop nudging elements by the millimeter for the rest of time.

Now it's inking time.