Keeling Group

I was walking around the Austin record convention which was connected to Flatstock during SXSW. Walking primarily in an somewhat bored, trance-like state from seeing the same old same old underwhelming everything's-a-dollar booth, the bootleg Cheap Trick live VHS guy booth, the overpriced Beatles and KISS collectibles booth, and the 80 year old woman with the single crate of dime-a-dozen Bette Midler and Loggins & Messina records which are somehow marked at $20 each, I found myself doing a double-take when I saw what appeared to be vinyl versions of the Si, Para Usted CDs I designed for Waxing Deep Records. Reissued on vinyl by Seattle's Light In The Attic Records, the vinyl just arrived to their offices days before leaving for Austin and when I finally met Josh, who runs the label, he told me I was the first person to grab a pair of the records! Now that volumes 1 and 2 of these fantastic compilations of psychedelic Cuban funk music from the '60s and '70s are at last available on vinyl, I thought I'd revisit a blog posting I made on Myspace (blast from the past!) about my creative process in designing the album cover for Si Para Usted Volume 2. If you will, I'd like to travel back in time... all the way back to June 24, 2008. {{{{{ time traveling sound effects }}}}}}} About 2 years ago, Dan from Waxing Deep in Montreal asked me to create the album artwork for a compilation he was releasing of Cuban funk and psych music from the 1960s through the early '80s. I did it and it looks like this: I was pretty happy with how it came out, but knew it wasn't 100% what I was trying to pull off. Volume 2 is on the way and I was fortunate enough to be asked to design the artwork for this one as well. I saw this as an opportunity to take the design more to the level I was hoping to with the first installment. Visually, these Cuban-designed posters from OSPAAAL have been an inspiration on dozens of my projects, and definitely inspired me here as well: Technically, I was hugely inspired by the Making of the HBO logo video I posted earlier on my blog and really wanted to create something largely away from the computer. After setting up dioramas and photo shoots for a few other CD covers (Heavy Session, Marc Hype & Jim Dunloop), I felt a similar approach would fit the pre-computer music from this CD. Dan sent me hi-resolution JPGs some of the album covers. I cut out just the images of the musicians, half-toned them out, sized them the way I wanted, printed them out, colored them in with crayons, and started setting them up in this arrangement: I designed the title and its framework in Illustrator, printed it out, traced it, scanned it back in, printed it out once again, cut it out, and crayoned that as well. Looking through a camera lens, I began moving things around and filling up empty spaces with cut-out rainbow shapes and grass and flowers I ""borrowed"" from Mali's yard. Wes helped set up the lighting to get a real pro-looking photo. I have to say I'm pretty pleased with the final image: