Original Cover Design
- Sleeve 028/100: Human. :II: Nature. (2020)
- Studio Album by Nightwish
- Label: Nuclear Blast
- Genre: Symphonic Metal / Orchestral
- Original Cover: Artwork by Janne Pitkänen
Sleeve #28 for my project #100albumsleeves came a week late 😅 That’s why some days ago I created an album cover to represent my failure:
Isn’t it ironic that I failed to create an album cover for an album that talks about human nature? Last week I have remembered my own humanity and the flow of life, but as I wrote in this Instagram post, missing one album didn’t mean I was going to give up and I took off where I was left.
Though I listen to many music genres, there are some I gravitate the most towards, and among them is Symphonic Metal. Last week after listening to Epica I felt like having more. I remembered I enjoyed Nightwish‘s double album Human. :II: Nature. a lot during 2020.
The first disc represents humanity with songs in symphonic metal and folk. It explores themes of human history, nature, religion, and empathy. The second disc represents nature and is an orchestral arrangement with no lyrics but some spoken words. The last piece includes narration by Geraldine James with the famous words by Carl Sagan:
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.
On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.
The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-
on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
It came good to me as I’ve been having many anxiety episodes. The first 50 min. make me feel a wide range of emotions while the last 30 allow me to introspect and relax. I can’t help but fascinate by the vastness of the universe and the beauty (and ugliness) of our existence.
If you’re not a metal music fan but you like orchestral or classical music, please give the second disc a listen. It is a gem. This fan-made video is also worth watching in case you want to put it on TV:
As for my cover, it is a rock with some human intervention just like the original 😅 . I wanted to represent both sides of the album, but it is clear that much of what we understand of nature comes from the human registry, so It was hard to come up with something much different.
In the original cover, this is represented with old written languages- the history. For my version, I went pictorial- the pre-history.
I had a lot of fun with it. It was much like doodling. Nature is represented with the stars, animals, and plants, while Humans are represented with a hand and a heart in its center. I love drawing human hearts and stars, I can’t help it. So this was also self-indulgent 😜
Album Cover Redesign by franzmori. Rock texture by The Blowup on Unsplash.
This is fan art, no copyright infringement intended.
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.
To know more about my personal project and see the rest of the cover designs in this series, go HERE.