My music taste usually ranges from punk, to rock, to metal, so I wanted to try a completely different genre. I settled on exploring the genre of Australian Reggae since it is such an eccentric genre. The album I chose was "Caress Your Soul" by Sticky Fingers.

For the album cover I wanted to have a traditional oil painting of the lead singer, Dylan Frost, in black and white. On top of the painting I wanted to digitally add in colorful designs to capture the chill vibe of the album and the genre of reggae. I also pulled inspiration from 60's psychedelic band posters as well as the actual album cover for color scheme ideas.

Once I settled on a photo, I added a quick grid to ensure I rendered the proportions correctly. I then applied black gesso to a white 9"x12" canvas since the hue of the reference was relatively dark. 

To create the colorful designs I wanted to do something that looked similar to acrylic water marbling, but digitally. (Mostly so I wouldn't waste paint)

The first step was rendering clouds in photoshop in greyscale.

I was then able to take the clouds that I rendered and play around with the liquify tool to create the swirls that mimicked acrylic water marbling.

I then created a warm and cool color palette to experiment with once I added in color. To add in color to the grayscale patterns I made, I would create a gradient layer on top of it and drop in the colors.

This is the final color palette I settled on for the front and back cover.

I played around with the overlapping of the pattern to create the illusion that Frost is being consumed by it. I also went with their classic font for the band name at the top, and then a more psychedelic font for the name of the album.

I used the same process for both sides of the inner sleeve. I went with cooler tones (blues and white) and lowered the opacity. 

For the record itself, I took the same pattern from the front cover and added the info (record label, side a or b, album name and tracks) on top of it.