Mathew Keller

Sketchie - Rain by High Lantern

Sleeve design for the Sketchie album “Rain by High Lantern” on Lumenessense Records.

This album cover design was based around a piece of leather craft the recording artist had produced, stamped with the name of the album, which I felt had a very rustic Old West ‘Frontier’ feel to it. Added to this the leather Prairie Rose he’d also produced and the imagery conjured up by the album title all the elements where in place for this release to fit perfectly into the design direction i’d set up for all of Sketchie’s releases; the theme of 20th Century American with it’s left-over colonialism, frontier towns and change brought about by Civil War.

My first step was to ask the recording artist to write out the tracklisting and credits for the album onto a piece of white A4 paper, which I cut up into relevant sections. These sections where then dipped in tea, baked in the oven and burned and torn around the edges before being nailed to my back garden fence which was covered in ivy creapers, algae and weather damaged, alongside the previously mentioned leather craft album title and prairie rose.
Waiting for the sun to be in a suitable position i took photographs of these pieces with an old SLR camera, had the film developed and scanned and then using Adobe Photoshop processed and tweaked the shots so they looked like silver chloride Calotypes. The thin strip of flowered fabric you can see in the enlargement which forms part of the image seen underneath the clear plastic CD case is actually a scan of an original piece of Civil War fabric from the ‘Washington Street’ collection.

Work Undertaken: March 2004