ZetaSphere - SolarFlow

SolarFlow is an electronic music single by my friend ZetaSphere. Its genre falls broadly under trance, and it’s quite energetic and dreamy.

Design requirements for this cover art:

• Use the colour purple
• Prominently feature abstract shapes/images
• Include the track and artist names

Process

The fractal image was made using Mandelbulb3D. I played around with the built-in MutaGen tool unti I found an interesting fractal, and then rendered it from a camera angle that makes it look sorta like stretchy bubblegum. I also took a second render of the entire fractal, which you can see in green in the background of the artwork.

The layering, composition, recolouring and text overlay was created using Affinity Photo. There’s also a faint, skewed grid in there to add some more variation to the image.

Reflections

Composition! It took a few iterations with design feedback from ZetaSphere to find the right balance of text and fractal size/position. When the name of the track changed, the cover had to be rearranged slightly to accommodate the new, different-length name. I think the effort paid off though, and I’m very happy with how the composition turned out.

It was also quite hard to create contrast between the foreground and the background - eventually I settled on using dark green for the background, but I think I would have used more blue instead if I was doing this again now.