Jafar and Samaa Records- The Task
Jafar reached out to me about 6 months ago to captain the design for his upcoming release "Earthstrong" (Attached at the bottom of the post). After successfully creating the design for his maiden voyage album he commissioned me to create a series of marketing images to represent his record label "Samaa Records" across his social media platforms. While I do not consider myself a commercial artist first, I have found that my artwork has a valuable application for psychedelic musicians and I am regularly commissioned to create "Visionary" artworks that can be used to represent alternative brands. So I was tasked to create 2 Header images and a Profile Picture for Samaa that could be used on Facebook and Soundcloud and any other platforms he chose. Due to a reasonably limited budget I needed to come up with a way to accomplish the task in a timely manner. As innovation is always at the forefront of my mind I considered many different approaches to a solution. In the end I decided that the best way to accomplish the task was to create 1, wide frame image that could be cropped in various ways to fit the necessary dimensions of the various platforms.
Samaa Banner- The Final
2 Headers, and a Profile Pic
Profile Pic
Left Header
Right Header
The Process
Sketching
When working with a specific goal in mind I will first sit down with my sketchbook. There is something about the pencil to the paper during this phase of idea generation that really streamlines my process. I don't always sketch first but because I needed to accomplish a very direct task this seemed like the way to go. At this phase I wanted to get some dynamic gestures down for our Whirling Dervish' as this was a request of Jafar. The Dervish is the archetype of Samaa Records and so it was important to him to keep with this theme. I decided that a night scene with a big psychedelic plant surrounded by musicians and whirlers would be a great way to accomplish our objectives.
Sketch to Photoshop
After I am satisfied with the general idea and thumbnails, I will take a couple pics of the sketches and load em up into Photoshop. I begin lassoing out the individual assets and composing the scene. After I am satisfied with the layout then I add a "Multiply" Layer and start adding washes of color.
To Paint
I use a number of programs to get the feeling I am searching for. Among them are Corel Painter, Zbrush, Groboto, renders from Trapcode Tao and Mir and passes from deepdreamgenerator.com
Jafar's Feedback
Because we wanted to achieve a distinct look for our banners and have significantly different feeling between them, Jafar asked me to turn the right side of the image into a daylight scene. The plant in the middle took up enough of the frame to be able to use it as a dividing point between the light and dark.
Almost There
And with some color refinements and about 15 hours of detail we end up at a nearly complete piece.
Logo and Detail and Done
At this stage I added the Samaa logo and gave it some 3 dimensional, cut stone effects and made a final pass over everything to ensure that every inch felt complete.
Jafar's Earthstrong Album Cover
"Together, we celebrate the birth of Samaa Records with this compilation "EARTHSRTONG" ❤️
Psyshop release date: 12.02.2018
Digital release: 19.02.2018
https://www.psyshop.com/Earthstrong-Samaa/sma1cd001/
Follow Samaa Records:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/samaarecords
SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/samaarecords
Bandcamp: https://samaarecords.bandcamp.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/samaarecords
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/samaarecords
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO9XxZnD8ldpBVnQoSr5Zpg
https://www.facebook.com/samaarecords/videos/425796241210836/
CD Layout
T-Shirt and Sticker Design
Along the way we took the album design and proceeded to create a T-shirt and a sticker to be shipped with the album. It is important to be comfortable working with layered, uncollapsed .psd files whenever creating marketing packages because you never know how or when the design will be translated and attributed to other mediums. To save yourself work on the back end its important to retain the individual layers that you generate along the way.
Announcement Header
The final asset for our Album Release Package was a simple header image displaying the artists who worked with Jafar and provided music for remixes and collaboration.
And that concludes this Behind the Scenes look. I hope you enjoyed it.
Please follow 
Thanks so much for your interest.
Kind Regards,
Sean
