NO THEFT x AMANDA DuFORD

Amanda DuFord approached me months ago to do her first official full length. Through our hashing out of ideas we built the record on the foundation of not having the album look like anything typical to the singer song writer stigma that is rampant in design (zoom in photo on face and slightly modified text, jus think disc makers design). For a month we poured over concepts, type, color, textures, placements, there wasn't one thing we didn't talk about. Amanda has a gift of scrap booking so the physical texture and lift off the page became a theme to build around.

I read her lyrics and drifted into so many places. The theme of the record is to not be overcome by doubt and it's numerous circumstances, to accept the vulnerability that comes with growing, and to accept the strength of grace in the good & ruff. I thought there should be a visible gradient of the ruff to deliverance. I did this in 2 ways: 1) Her lyrics reference a run down shack that's a safe trap, I conceptualized that with barren trees/stormy clouds/jagged mountains and then built a heavenly city where the final outcome lies 2) obviously color.
I put the whole imagery in a single drop of rain for reference to the album title. I kept the edges scrappy & incomplete to mirror the scrap book theme.

BASIC METHOD: Thumbnail, build in Illustrator, print each piece out, transfer to water color, water color each piece, arrange by laying each piece on top of the other, send to VANJA. in Michigan to shoot in 3 diff. formats digital/35mm/Hasselblad (we chose the 35mm for the grittier grain), edit film, add type. VOILA. The tear drop alone is over 2ft tall.


For the back of the record I thought it should reflect the outcome of the themes: the Heavenly city. I didn't want to jus zoom in on the city for the back, so I made the city out of each piece where as the cover is 1 piece with the city painted on it. Both the cover and back have a small path in them, 1 to lead from the shack up, and then seeing the path again but in gold leading into the city, kinda pilgrims progress path of sorts.

Working with watercolored paper naturally bends it, so when laying it down it created these excellent depths by the unique shadows from those bends. This is my second all watercolor album cover (with VANJA. shooting it as well, this is the first ALBUM we did) & it's the biggest project I've done. I want all my work to be considered a natural extension of the client I'm working with. I never want my work to be blaring NO THEFT, I want people to think of my client more than they have before and this I consider the greatest accomplishment of my work.

Amanda is having her album release show at the Q Cafe | Nov. 5 | 8PM | $8, my GV brothers will be backing her up and she asked if Thomas Carr Stiles would open, I'm in.