So, this left me thinking for a bit. I did sketches, looked at images in local antique shops and the more I listened to the music the more I felt a disconnect between the parts and the music. I started realizing there was an interesting eerie factor to antique imagery but at the same time the music had a modern swing to it, with good energy. I needed to find a composition that played both sides of this focus.

I remembered that my wife and I had this vintage styled pram that I really liked. It had the vintage/antique quality I wanted without being so gothic or victorian to feel like I was depicting something from Bram Stoker's Dracula. So I had the right icon image to base the whole design around, but I needed to place it somewhere. Well that positive energy of the music that is so uniquely blended with the dark tones and production felt like I needed to mirror that. So I thought I would start getting the pram outside to take pics of it. Blue skies, fluffly blue clouds, all of it. The positive nature of just being outdoors, which initself can be a dangerous place at times, but it's not always. I kept having that re-occuring thought.

So the idea was starting to gain legs, I was seeing in my head the whole scene and shooting with negative space in mind for the things I was going to composite in. I had a relationship that I was going to depict between these two contrasting parts. This relationship of darkness and light, threat and safety, etc. They paired off each other in a way that opened itself up to many metaphors. I started doodling some more...

So here comes the hard part right, I've found what I think is the perfect cornerstone iconic image with the pram, and I have this "great" idea of using the owl. I think I'm on to the solution. But it still felt too obvious to me, and their music is anything but obvious. It's very dynamic, there's almost a Pink Floyd quality to the little complexities. I was on to something, but it didn't have that abstract component. I decided to do some prints and sketch all over them. I still had nothing. Usually when I get stuck like this I start pulling out all my favorite books and just sit on the floor flipping through pages. If that doesn't work, I'll go get in the car, or on my motorbike, and just ride around hoping to see something that strikes me. Luckily it did, I was flipping through my art books and I came across one of my favorite artists, Salvador Dali. He has a painting inspired by the concept of a Flight of a Bumblebee. It depicts a pomegranite turning into a fish, into a tiger, into a gun, etc... I took two inspirations from the piece, one I was being too literal to scale and the surrealism work of Dali played with proportion in beautiful ways. And, I had considered the bird simply because I had taken the picture in this big open field. So I switched, and I started exploring flying insects. Much more unsettling, not has iconic to horror and goth like ravens, crows, etc were, and I could be more story-centric this way. It started to feel more like a nursery rhyme to me visually. I was beginning to get happy.

Once I had my insect, I started exploring with the other story components. Much about the band is misunderstood. Even their name, people think it's some connection with Cancer the disease when it's more a relation of the astrological period Cancer, the crab. The title of the album, "No Vampires in Gilroy" is an interesting story about this town south of Silicon Valley. It's a little bit sleepy and country like for a free way town heading south out of Silicon Valley. So there's lots of smoke and mirrors going on. The last thing for me was to depict and connect the relationship of those two parts I mentioned earlier. So I decided to add a baby's arm to the image, coming out of the pram and the bee would have this string around it similar to a balloon. There were lots of analogies for this, but simply put, I like the curiousity it creates. Was the bee kept by the baby, is the bee attacking the baby, who is in control?

After all this I found the crop that I liked and added our logo and title. I purposely worked not in the format of a CD cover because I tend to become obsessed with the grid and spacing within that square format. So this time around I just made a big piece of art, and then was going to make it fit and work within that frame. I actually found this much more freeing, and it's definitely an approach I'd take again in the future. It sort of felt like old skateboard magazines looked when I was a kid. The layouts were popping out of the frame, crops were very unique and unspecific. It felt not templatized, which is something I'm always a fan of.