Looking back through my songs, I’m very proud of the cover art for the various singles, and albums I’ve released. It’s been a pleasure working with the highly skilled people, I have had the honour of collaborating with over the years. Talented photographer/artist Nikonas Davis, and other visual artists such as Raven Lapensee, and Jeremy Cybanski. I also made some of the covers myself too, using my own photographs, and a photoshop style editor on my iPhone. You can add titles, filters, etc. It’s not as precise as a computer program, but there is still a lot you can do, to get professional results, as you will see.
The first single I made cover art for, was for a song called “Wine”, which I recorded back in 2016. It would also be the album artwork also, as I was impressed by it so much. It features myself, singer/songwriter James Hardiment, who is Cornwall, Ontario, Canada based presently, standing in front of a canvas, covered in multi coloured paint. The backdrop behind me is also splattered in the stuff, a very vibrant, and abstract piece. I still have the shirt hanging in my closet, the canvas too, which I hung up on my wall for the longest time.
The photograph was shot by Ottawa based (at the time anyways) Nikonas Davis, who would help me with many of my projects in the city. I was living and working in Ottawa at the time, and that’s where we filmed and recorded everything from 2016-2018.
Pictured: The “Wine” single, and also album cover artwork. Nik taught me a lot about building artwork using my phone using an app photo editor. It allowed him to add titles, as well as colour correct the image.
The next single I would work on was for a track called “Graffiti”, this time I would have the help of Nik again, but also an artist I worked with in Cornwall years ago, called Raven. She would hand draw a picture of me in the outfit I wore for the music video we had shot (presently unavailable on YouTube right now due to me accidentally deleting it. There is still a copy on my old editing computer which I may be able to salvage at some point.) Nik would use his skills with the photo editing app, which I would download myself to help me market my brand, to grow my social media presence at that time. I would create fun pictures by blending 2 or 3 images together. The final result was pretty cool!
Pictured: The combined efforts of Raven and Nik really paid off in the final single cover for “Graffiti”. I love it so much. The attention to detail is truly wonderful.
The next single was for a song called “Collide”, this track was my turn to make the artwork. I took a screenshot from the official music video and added some titles in the same photo editing app that Nik had used previously. I was rather impressed with the results, I love how the colours pop, in the mostly black and white picture.
Pictured: The “Collide” cover art, which had I created this time around. The two different colours represent two people, from very different worlds, colliding together in a passionate embrace, or something like that anyways…
My final single release, before the whole album came out, was for a song called “Innocence”. It was a track about growing up in the 1990s in a village called Smithy Bridge, in the United Kingdom. Close to the town I was born, called Rochdale (pronounced “Rotch-dale”). For those people that don’t know small towns in England, it’s very close to the city of Manchester, you may be familiar with their world famous football (soccer for North Americans) clubs Manchester United, and rivals Manchester City. I chose to take a picture of an old cassette deck, that I had purchased very cheaply, at a local Value Village. I combined that with an image of my face in the photo editing app to create the final piece.
Pictured: The cover art for the single “Innocence”. This would be the last single before releasing the final album in 2017.
In 2018, I decided to work on a brand new project called “Corrupted”, all about 1920s prohibition (alcohol was made illegal in North America), gangsters, dangerous women, and crooked cops. For this project I would use a screen shot from the music video for the cover art. I would then use this bizarre computer glitch filter, which would distort the image, as though it was a corrupted computer file. Kind of a double meaning to it, which I thought was pretty cool at the time anyways!
Pictured: The “Corrupted” single cover art. A screen shot from the music video, which was shot at a cool mansion off Bank St. and Albion area.
The final artwork that’s been made for my music, was for an unreleased album called “Rescue Me”, which is going to be a very Italo Disco inspired collection of songs. I talk about that style of music in previous blog entries, basically a type of dance music from the 1980s that originated in Italy but was popular in mainland Europe. For the cover art I hired talented artist/animator Jeremy Cybanski, who is Ottawa based. I was introduced through my sisters friend. I wanted something that incorporated the cubism art style. This was very popular on the Italo Disco tracks vinyl cover artwork coming out of Spain back then, so I wanted to emulate that, with this new original piece.
Pictured: Jeremy did a great job in capturing that 1980s feeling with this piece. I was very blown away by his talents as a digital artist.
So that’s it, so far, on this visual artwork journey I’ve been on, with some amazing artists in this community. I hope to create more art in the next few years, and hopefully more albums too!
That’s all for tonight.
James