It all started with a wintery walk away from my small studio flat in Kingston Upon Thames, a suburb of south west London. I was working on a new style of music combining found sounds and foley recordings with organic wavetable synths and Max Ensembles which I had just become engrossed in, this was my music EP known as LDP_1.
During this time I would take daily walks by the river and this is where I became fascinated with the patina of the wood.
It was the benches and gates in particular that had the textures which appealed the most. I was drawn to the points where the wood had been cut and weathered over the years creating an ecosystem for moss and fungus.
I would take photographs and on first appearance the wood samples looked brown and dull but once I started enhancing the colour levels at different points of the spectrum on Photoshop I found latent colours in the fungus and grain that could be drawn out and exaggerated
I made a set of 12 square pictures from my favorite wood photographs and became obssessed with how beautiful they were. These became the textures I mapped across all the artwork for the project.
The first piece I made out of them was the Zaflon Logo, to display my artist name. I used as the main artwork for the EP and logo for all digital music platforms. I created this in Photoshop by overlaying, cutting into and masking overlayed photo assets, which I called LDP’s
I then created the Zaflon Coin, a circular cut of the same artwork as I needed this logo to work as both a squre and a circle for different social media platforms.
After developing the main logo I created a portrait of Gilan using the same technique, a form of digital montaging using the woodgrain as the assets to “paint” with, by overlaying the assets on a photograph I created the likeness of Gilan, who was the lead singer on the project, singing “Seven Stalkers” and “Nightmare Division”. The whole effect is created by positioning and blending the LDP’s, cutting away what I don’t need and mixing the colours in the shadows mids and highs seperately at every oportunity. The digital tools I use are essentially quite basic and my version of Photoshop is CS6 (2012) running on an old computer.
Finally to complete the project I created a self portrait as the producer behind the dark and eary sound of LDP_1. It was based off a photograph, then overlaid with a black wax skull (a life-sized skull shaped candle made of black wax) to get the definition around the deep inset eyes. The EP would go onto be very well recieved and even played on BBC6 Music Recomends by May Anne Hobbs
If this has peeked your interest, you can listen to and download the EP in it’s entirety on my BandCamp.
