Creating an Album Cover

2025 brought a new Album Cover project to add to the portfolio. Each album cover I do is a reminder to the beginner artist in me of a dream come true.

Dec 23, 2025

Earlier this year, I found myself in talks for another Album Cover illustration. I’ve had the good fortune of being commissioned to create cover art for a work of music a handful of time of times. With the rise of platforms like Spotify I believed the art of the record album cover to be lost. But vinyl endures and there are those musicians who are determined to keep alive the relationship between evocative music and imagery.

As the summer drew to a close, those talks began to formalize. My next commission would be for reed quintet Edmund Welles.

FREAKWOOD reed quintet composed by Cornelius Boots

Commissioned in 2024 by Paradise Winds reed quintet:
Tiffany Pan - oboe
Patrick Murphy - alto sax
Joseph Kluesener - bassoon
Stefanie Gardner - bass clarinet
Joshua Gardner - clarinet.

After several zoom calls, we developed a time-table and design brief. Here are the first round of thumbnails -

A note on aspect ratios

One thing that kept surfacing as we discussed the cover art was how it would be presented differently as a thumbnail image on a digital play verses a theoretical 12” vinyl pressing. Added to that were considerations for its use as a cover for a playbill or for the actual printed music. Then came the vertical social media aspect ratio; could this cover be designed to work in all these dimensions?

I created this template to find out.

Feedback from interested parties came in the form of comments on the webpage used for project updates as well as live conversation via zoom, and some extra emails. we moved on to a second iteration of our thumbnail designs.