Original Cover Design
- Sleeve 008/100: Mother Earth (2000 Europe – 2003 America)
- Studio Album by Within Temptation
- Label: DSFA
- Genre: Symphonic metal
- Original Cover Artwork by Scale To Fit (now Das Buro)
Sleeve number 8 for my project #100albumsleeves🔥.
Believe it or not this painting took me almost 7 years. I first sketched the concept for this in 2014 while listening voraciously to Within Temptation’s studio album “Mother Earth”. There’s a piece of lyric that repeats across several songs in the album: “She gives and she takes”. That’s exactly where I took inspiration from, Mother Earth giving her gifts, and Mother Earth throwing her anger at us after seeing what we’ve done with her precious creations.
The illustration was pretty big for me back then and I was aiming for realism, which led me to not work on it consistently. The last time I worked on this piece was in 2015.
I promised myself I would finish it “someday” and I’m glad the idea didn’t leave me and I could finally meet my promise. Originally I didn’t conceive the idea as an album cover, so for the new version, I inverted the image and adjusted the proportions.
I had to face some drama as well: All the old feelings and true reasons why I haven’t finished this illustration resurfaced. I was intimidated by its size and the number of details and elements in it.
I was deciding on what things to rescue from the last time I worked on it and what things to do anew so it could fit into my current drawing style. But mostly I was doubtful I could finish a double illustration in 4 days, so I felt whatever decision I took had to make things faster for me. Ironically, focusing on how to save time made me waste more time (a whole day to be specific).
After addressing the drama, the decision I took was to do whatever was most pleasant for me. So I re-did the sketch in Ink (a part of the process I truly enjoy) and I kept all parts of the painting I was satisfied with.
Now I only had 3 days and my next decision was that I had to be OK with whatever result I had by Thursday afternoon. I decided ahead of time I was going to LOVE this illustration no matter the result and that I was going to call it finished once and for all (And yep, I LOVE IT). So here’s the final result:
Album Cover Redesign by franzmori. 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.