More of my day job: Artwork for Camille Cortinas' latest album, Taken Apart

I'm so excited to share this latest project of mine! Some background: In the last few years, I reconnected with an old high school friend who had turned out to be a talented and successful singer/songwriter, Camille Cortinas. And, since I had turned out to be a designer, we started working on projects together. She was kind enough to hire me to do her band's album art a few years ago, then t-shirts to help launch her solo career, and now, her first solo album. It's called Taken Apart, and it's available for download at CD Baby as of yesterday. (It will be distributed next month in physical form and other digital outlets.)

So I don't have a printed disc yet, but I can share the artwork. Camille didn't want to create a bunch of excess packaging, which I was totally on board with, so we decided on a simple 2-sided cardboard sleeve:

front of sleeve

back of sleeve

disc label

When we started the project, the album didn't have a title yet, but Camille told me the theme was evolution, change, growth, that type of thing. The image of the nesting dolls just sort of came to me, as good ideas sometimes do when you're lucky! We explored a few other concepts, but decided we liked the dolls idea best. Originally we considered doing blank dolls, which they sell for crafters to paint their own designs onto. I liked the graphic simplicity, and also was having trouble finding a painted set that I liked. They all had a kind of fake-folksy feel too them, hard to explain, but just cheesy-looking. But then I found this random Russian shop with literally thousands of these dolls (called Matryoshka dolls), and the guy had this one set of vintage dolls I just fell in love with. They weren't quite like all his really old antique ones – they were probably from the 60s or 70s. And they also weren't like the contemporary fake-folksy-cheesy ones I was finding everywhere. They had much more authenticity, with kind of a retro feel, and fantastic, bright, almost neon colors. We snatched them up and staged a photo shoot in Camille's dining room. Camille looked beautiful, our photographer was her talented sister Megan Cortinas, and I stood by lining up the dolls, fidgeting with the lighting, and generally getting in Megan's way as art directors do :-) The images came out great, I finished up the artwork, and all that was left was to fill in the title. When Camille emailed me and said they had come up with the name Taken Apart, I couldn't think of anything more perfect to complete the concept.

I can't wait to see it on the shelves! I got to hear early versions of some of the tracks, and they sound wonderful. If you like beautiful female vocals with pleasant folk arrangements, you should really check it out. You can preview and buy the songs at CD Baby, and fan Camille on Facebook for the details of the big release next month.