Making of the “Cyan Night Dreams” artwork

Hey guys! It’s Benni here. Today we have a CLUB OF THE DEAD EXCLUSIVE “Making of” post about the development of the artwork for “Cyan Night Dreams”. We hope you’ll enjoy it!

The Idea

The progress from the first concepts to the final artwork was pretty much the same as it was back when we released “Dead and Alive”: Kai came up with a basic idea and I developed the final artwork from there. We also kept our approach of having an artwork fully rendered in 3D, which made it easier for us to create images for the booklet, the marketing material, the videos etc.

Since most of the songs were pretty much finished when we started working on the artwork, Kai created a mood board with a selection of pictures that fitted the songs and the overall mood of the album:

In hindsight, I think that this mood board already captured the feeling of the final result pretty damn well. You can clearly see, which ideas made it in the artwork eventually, especially the way the light looks with its 80ties neon vibe. Elements you can also hear and “feel” on the record, especially when it comes to Kai’s sound design for the synths.

Since both Kai and I really dig Mick Gordon and the soundtrack for Doom Eternal, some inspiration from that game cannot be denied. Especially the first image on the mood board – with the skull and the fire – looks a lot like a game level from Doom. And if you take a look at the final CD cover, you’ll find a lot of elements that were clearly inspired by this picture. Oh, and you can also hear it on the album: The middle part of the title track “Cyan Night Dreams” with its down tuned guitars, for example, reminds me quite a bit of the soundtrack by Mick Gordon.

As a next step, Kai made some rough sketches outlining his ideas for the “Thing”, which later became this strange and threatening creature. To me it’s had a bit of a “Stranger Things” feeling (which also fitted the 80ties vibe) mixed with something that reminds me a bit of the Mouth of Sauron from Lord of the Ring, haha.

But I think that especially this sketch from Kai pretty much nailed the final artwork:

From 2D to 3D

My first test 3D models were a lot closer to Kai’s original sketches than the final creature I came up with. But something was odd and missing. The teeth didn’t look that great. They looked much better in his rough sketches where the whole “Thing” had a much more organic feeling, which didn’t translate that well into 3D and the “feet” also looked a bit boring.

I did a lot of iterations and finally the “Thing” got its final “spider feet”. The cool thing with that solution also was, that it now could be animated in a much cooler way!

As you can see the first test render didn’t look particularly good. It looked more like straight out of a cheap sci-fi series from the early 90ties, haha. But well, that’s what test renders are for. And it’s nice to see the evolution from test to final version over time. But still: The teeth just didn’t look right, so I went back to the virtual 3D dentist getting the monster a completely new denture.

As a side note: One thing looked cooler in the first test render. The glowing green! I just noticed this again while writing this blog post. But unfortunately this green was way too bright so we weren’t able to use that color for the printed CD inlay. That would have been so cool. We had to adjust the brightness and the color until we were able to replicate exactly that color on paper as well.

From there, it took a lot of hours getting the materials, textures and the lighting right and even more hours rendering out the various images and animations we used for the album release.

I also did the shirt design in 3D using a variation of the monster on the album cover. Here you can see two shots, one without textures and the final t-shirt motive.