I know Sugix Anantra since his early career with local metalcore band Pecah Arah. As a guitar hobbyist myself, I reckon his amazing guitar solo skill; fast, accurate, and clean hybrid and alternate picking with a great feel of melodies in slow passages. It is not a surprising thing that he won the Ibanez Flying Finger Indonesia competition and became the brand ambassador of Ibanez Indonesia ever since.
I had worked with him helping his several of his solo video where you can find in his earliest videos. Sure, I was not a videographer and don't expect something masterful video shooting there. I was there just to help him record his early guitar work video.
He contacted me in February 2020, talking about his upcoming EP album and he assigned me for the album cover. I was always excited about this kind of project. He told me the title would be "Mother Earth's Dream". The deadline was set 2 weeks from the day he contacted. Okay, two weeks was more than enough to finish it.
Brainstorming & Drafting
During the initial discussion with him, he preferred to my old artwork of Pemuteran Bay Festival 2018. He is interested to create something like that but with a model of a Balinese woman, and mix it with elements of Dewi Laksmi goddess and lotus flower. And the rest is up to me (yeah every designer loves that part).
As usual, the first step to do is to quick-map his reference and also my own ideas that may construct the artwork. You can see keywords of ideas on the ugly sketch below.
In many cases, I didn't do any sketching to draw out a clearer picture. Not because I was an expert in putting ideas straight from my brain to Photoshop, but simply because I wasn't a very good illustrator. Sometimes, I feel that sketching out ideas is just a waste of time. In this case, I already had quite a clear vision of what to do. It's because of his preference for my old work that makes the job easier. The ground idea was already set and the rest is just to mix it with the new reference and mess it up for something different.
My idea in my head at that time, a Balinese woman in the center, with all her Balinese dancer attributes, surrounded by natural elements like leaves, branches, stones, sitting or praying on a flower just like Dewi Laksmi Goddes in Hindu Bali beliefs.
In the making.
Before going down to the composition, I had to find proper images. Since the main focal point was the woman in the center, I put the utmost focus on this first. As usual, I went to popular stock images such as Shutterstock or Adobe Stock, hoping to find a proper image. But the result was somewhat disappointing. I couldn't find woman images that fit my preference of doing praying or sitting yoga poses.
I also had a brief idea to mix the body parts image from different sources into one. But then I was concerned about the lighting on the face. I wasn't sure about the face type too. Balinese face was not that familiar in those stock image agencies.
How about taking pictures of a model? It could be a great option, just ask a friend and shoot some images on her, that looked easy wasn't?
But I find a lot more flexibility when I think 3D model would do great. I could just change anything; angles, lightings, poses, even the models, I could change it anytime I want.
So I went deep into Daz3D and explore all the possibilities there. As I built the model here in the 3D object, I feel now a bit more confident with the artwork. The main focus was set, the rest is to explore all the other details. Then I sent him the initial, rough artwork.
Revision and more details
He quite liked the overall feel but the woman's face was considered not so 'Balinese' or at least 'Asian' type. I actually felt the same too, so I explored more for the facial setting in that 3D program. Other things he noted that he preferred more 'reddish' color around it, perhaps the lotus petals.
After finding the preferred 'Balinese' face, I then worked on other details, birds, accessories, and of course adding his preferred 'reddish' color. The tiring part on this case was recoloring the lotus petal because each petal were in individual layers. So each layer was attached with at least 4 layers. It's not that difficult, but tiresome work due to its abundance of layers.
The overall process took around 3 days of normal work hours. 1 day of exploring the 3d model, 1 day of the initial or drafting of the rough artwork, and finally the last day for finishing the artwork.
The final result was a bit different from my initial idea during the brainstorming process. The woman, when I planned it for the first time, had several Balinese dancer accessories. But then I abandoned the idea since the accessories would take away a lot of other nature details like leaves and birds. It would be a chaotic look due to excessive elements. And I was afraid that the artwork would feel like a traditional Balinese dance album if the Balinese elements were way too dominant.
In the end, we really liked the result. It felt mystical but not going into a dark, devilish theme.
You can also watch the Photoshop layers breakdown in my YouTube Channel:
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