About This Project

Beauty. Chaos. Popcorn. These are three themes at the very core of Cicada The Burrower’s 2014 EP, The Oasis, and I was challenged to convey these ideas when they asked me to do the artwork for their opus.

To achieve this, I decided to take a more experimental route than I had ever done before. I wanted there to be an organic foundation to the artwork – rather than make something entirely on a computer – so I started with watercolor on paper. After making some spots of color, I scanned them, and collaged them together in Photoshop.

From there, I implemented some chaos by running the collage through a Markov chain generator. The resulting randomly generated image became the base artwork for the album.

On the cover and disc designs, there is an inversion of the main artwork, creating the sense of an an oasis or and island from the chaos around it.