Having described in my last post how we came to be lucky enough to have Martin Springett designing for us the cover of our new album – “Winter Blue and Evergreen” – this post demonstrates how Martin’s design evolved from the draft pencil drawing to the finished artwork.
Martin was generous enough to keep us informed throughout the process and watching the eventual artwork slowly emerge was a fascinating and valuable lesson.
From the draft Martin drew the final outline of cover in a larger form:
He then started to fill in the detailed shading – still working only in monochrome:
…until the final form was complete:
The image was then digitised and coloured on the computer. Doing so has the significant advantage that different colour values can be tried before the final version is settled upon. Martin also added the titling and borders to turn the wonderful image of the Goddess into a CD cover.
At this point the artwork was sent to us – in digital form – so that we could submit it to our chosen Digital Music distributor and to work it up into a cover for physical CDs:
Martin is in a position to be able to choose from whom he accepts commissions and we are greatly honoured that agreed to design and create our album artwork for us. Do check out Martin’s splendid website – as well as that of his band – The Gardening Club.
“Album covers are like any other vehicle, they are a means of illustrating a story”.
Peter Blake
The fabulous cover for our new CD – “Winter Blue and Evergreen” was created for us by Toronto-based musician and artist – Martin Springett.
That we ended up with such an excellent and fitting cover is entirely down to the Chanteuse. She describes how it came about:
“How I was connected with Martin is through a friend and work colleague of my husband’s named Joan Steacy. Joan is an award-winning graphic novelist and instructor at Camosun College’s Comic and Graphic Arts program. Joan was over one day and I had her listen to a track from the new ‘Anam Danu’ album. She said the music reminded her of her friend Martin’s music, and then she explained that he was also fabulous graphic artist who had done album covers for his band, and other bands, as well as being a children’s book illustrator“.
The Chanteuse investigated Martin’s website and found that the style of his artwork fitted with thoughts that she already had in mind for the CD cover. Joan put the Chanteuse in touch with Martin – she called him and introduced us and asked if he might be prepared to take on a commission for us. Having listened to some of the tracks from our first release – “Winds of Change” – Martin most kindly and generously agreed to take on the project.
Martin and the Chanteuse engaged in an email exchange to determine the elements that the cover should include. Martin sent her examples of previous works in similar styles to those that they were discussing and the Chanteuse sent him images of Celtic designs that she had sourced.
Common ground having been agreed upon, Martin quickly came up with some initial ideas as to the form that the cover might eventually take. These lovely drawings show how it rapidly evolved. (Note that we had clearly at that point not settled on a final title for the album!).
Martin wrote of making the figure “more lively“; of creating “a big gesture that would flow across the square shape“. This is what he came up with:
We loved it and immediately gave it the thumbs up. We loved the flow and movement of the Goddess herself – we loved the elements of the circle of life that have been incorporated and we loved the way that Martin had pulled into the image ideas and themes that we had addressed in the songs on the album.
We eagerly anticipating seeing the finished cover. The process by which Martin turned his draft into the finished artwork will be the subject of my next post.
Since my last update on the subject of the eagerly awaited new Anam Danu album – “Winter Blue and Evergreen” – much has occurred.
The tracks have passed through the mastering process described in my last update and have been assembled into an album. Final tweaks were made and all is now as good as we can get it.
We now have a splendid and beautiful cover for the CD – the which you can see at the top of this post. This lovely piece of work was created specially for us and I will pass on the full story of how it came to be in a subsequent post.
All of this goodness has been bundled up in the approved fashion and shipped off to our Digital Music Distributor of choice. All we can do now is to sit back and wait, because the process normally takes around three to four weeks. With Christmas looming it may even take a little longer – but as you all know: “All good things…”
Once all has been through the approval mill the album will become available through all the usual digital channels.
Finally – Anam Danu now has its own website, which can be found at:
We are pretty pleased with the way that the website has turned out, but is is conspicuously lacking in any of the usual atmospheric band shots. The reasons for that are sadly obvious; in times of pandemic trying to organise a photo shoot runs that gamut from difficult to downright foolhardy.
The website will be kept up to date with all manner of musical goings-on as things progress. Needless to say one of the first things to look for there will be the firm release dates – once we know them – as well as details as to where to find the album.
The music on this album was very much born out of this most unfortunate year. Our hope is that in this manner (as of course in many others) something good will come from it.
My last update on the topic of the new music shortly to appear from Anam Danu (my now two year collaboration with The Chanteuse) hit the streets (ie – appeared on this blog) about a month ago now. We had – at the time – just sent out copies of all of the tracks in our burgeoning collection to a small number of trusted individuals with the request that they give us their unvarnished opinions thereof.
This they duly did – and lessons were learned!
As a result – and after a certain amount of horse-trading – we ended up with a mutually acceptable running order. Final mixes followed rapidly, exported as 24 bit WAV files (that is in decently high quality versions) and the package completed with a guide MP3 file of the whole album with timed inter-track gaps, fades and suchlike. Accompanied by the necessary documentation – band name, album title, track names and numbers, track times and ISRC numbers for each track – everything was transferred to our chosen mastering company (CPS Mastering of Vancouver) and left in the care of the estimable Brock McFarlane.
Now – for those who have no idea what audio mastering entails, Wikipedia has this helpful explanation:
“Mastering, a form of audio post production, is the process of preparing and transferring recorded audio from a source containing the final mix to a data storage device (the master), the source from which all copies will be produced (via methods such as pressing, duplication or replication).
One of the key reasons for getting your mastering done professionally is that – being effected in a suitable acoustically-neutral mastering environment – the end result can be guaranteed to play successfully on pretty much all systems and in all spaces.
Yesterday we received from CPS the first mastered draft of the whole collection. We must now spend much time listening to it on different devices and in different environments to figure out if anything needs tweaking or whether we are good to go.
Then we just need to wait for album artwork (that’s another story!) and the whole can be dispatched to our chosen digital distributor to be sent to the various streaming/digital music providers – and CDs burned as required.
I will – of course – keep you informed of (inevitably slow) progress…
“My congratulations to you, sir. Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.”
Samuel Johnson
In my post to this journal of July 17th – ‘Closer than you think‘ – I described how the Chanteuse and I had contrived – in spite of all difficulties arising from the COVID-19 pandemic lock-down – to start remotely recording her vocals onto a set of ten tracks that I had prepared – and which we hoped to turn into a new Anam Danu album in due course.
My last update on the matter came at the end of a post of August 25th entitled ‘Busy, busy, busy‘ – the which was primarily (unsurprisingly) concerned with just how busy we were… it being ‘that time of year’!
Well – these things do indeed take time – but I feel that an update is due.
We have finished recording the vocals and the tracks are essentially complete. That does not mean that they are ready to be sent out into the world. I have been doing much in the way of post-processing and making initial and intermediate mixes. The next stage is to finalise the mixes, to decide on the sequencing and to send the tracks off to a professional Mastering Engineer to get them ‘mastered’ ready for submission to whichever online distribution company we choose to go with. Much more on that stage of the process later.
There is – however – one more thing to be done before we send our tracks for mastering… and that is to get feedback on them from some trusted and interested parties. That is where we are at right now – and I can tell you that it is a nerve-racking process. Having spent many months in very close proximity to these creations as they have evolved we must now stand back from them and ask others to give us – in their own time – their opinions on our endeavours.
There is no Victoria Fringe Festival this year, for reasons which will require no further elucidation. Indeed, fringe festivals are – in this exceedingly difficult time – exceedingly thin on the ground.
In common, no doubt, with other similar organising companies Intrepid Theatre juggled for a while notions of alternative festival forms (online only – local companies in carefully socially isolated venues…) but in the end had to admit defeat. One of the major problems is that many small fringe companies can only make their festival visits work financially if they can hop from one such to another, filling their summers with a brief international tour of fringes. Economies of scale – dontcha know…
Well – no-one is doing international fringe tours this year – so that all went out of the window. Intrepid – like many small companies heavily reliant on grant income – is having to work hard just to survive, without taking on further major challenges. Kudos to them – say I – for keeping the ship afloat.
So – the gentle reader will doubtless be musing – at a time of year when things are normally pretty frenetic, the Immigrant must be able to kick-back and enjoy the dog days sitting on the deck, chilled white in hand, enjoying the late August sunshine.
Not a bit of it! I am busier than ever and cannot frankly imagine how my fringe duties might have been fitted in at all.
The chief source of such busyness is my rapidly upcoming computer literacy teaching. Term starts in a couple of weeks and, because the course is being taught entirely online, all of the course structures and materials must be re-designed and re-written accordingly. It is one thing in normal times for students to slumber gently for ninety minutes in a lecture theatre whilst I drone on about the good-old days of computing (after all, when I am done they can all head off to the cafeteria for cheap sustenance and the chance to ‘diss’ my efforts) but quite another being taught online. In the comforts (or otherwise) of their own homes not a one of them would put up with an hour and a half of a disembodied voice emanating from the equivalent of a Zoom session. They would more likely just go back to bed and do what students do best.
No – the canny lecturer just has to get a whole bunch more canny than ever in order to keep them engaged. I will report back as to how it all goes.
My other busyness is much more fun. Since The Chanteuse and I discovered how to record with each other safely at arms-length we have been rampaging our way through our back-catalog of as-yet unrecorded tracks – trying to complete them before she too has to go back to work in September. Though I say it myself, we have been doing some great work. There is much to do on the mixing and mastering fronts – not to mention all the other bits and pieces that go to make up a release – but we have an album’s worth of material and we aim to get something out into the big wide world this autumn.
Having described in my last post how we came to be lucky enough to have Martin Springett designing for us the cover of our new album – “Winter Blue and Evergreen” – this post demonstrates how Martin’s design evolved from the draft pencil drawing to the finished artwork.
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