original cover design
- Sleeve 044/100: El Viaje A Ninguna Parte (2004)
- Studio Album by Bunbury
- Label: Parlophone Music
- Genre: Latin Folk Rock
- Original Cover: Photography by Jose Girl
This post is part of the 100 Sleeves: One hundred Album Covers Re-Designed project, a personal challenge I created for myself at the end of 2020. The goal is to create 100 album covers, a new one every week, inspired by the music I’m enjoying at the moment.
I have mixed feelings about the resulting illustration for this one. I kind of hate it. I kind of love it. The reason probably is the same old one: I had high expectations that were hard to meet.
This album marked the anxious years of my puberty (13-15yo) and it has a special place in my heart. I wanted to come up with something equally special inspired by the eclectic nature of the music, and I inevitably put pressure on myself. I always create my worst work when I try to create my best 😂.
Album Cover Redesign by franzmori. This is fan art, no copyright infringement intended.
The album’s lyrics are based on the experiences lived by Bunbury on a trip through Latin America, and touch on themes of belonging, nostalgia, friendship, emotional pain, and infidelity. The music also has elements of the different places he visited, and the resulting sound is unique in each song. The promotional material for the album showed Bunbury roaming with his guitar in a circus and even his following work, Freak Show, revolved around this concept. I wanted to create something around this same theme and came up with the idea of an itinerant magic circus flying in the night sky.
I usually don’t create complex scenes and this represented a challenge for me, but I’m happy that I pushed through my insecurities and materialized the idea. The part of me that doesn’t like the result is thinking “this is not quite representative of Bunbury’s aesthetic”, or what I personally look for in an album cover. It has more of a book cover illustration vibe, I think. But I sure learned some lessons making this one.
animated GIF with part of the process
Would you like your own Album Cover design?
I’m available for commissions!
Listen to the art! I’ll be adding a new album each week to this Spotify playlist HERE.