The Wheel of Time Comes Around by CareldeWinter on DeviantArt (original) (raw)
Cover for the new Clear Blue sky album, "Don't Mention Rock and Roll."
This picture has been a long time surfacing. It was commissioned by the band "Clear Blue Sky" as the cover for their latest album "don't
Mention Rock and Roll".
Here is a link to their website.
[link]
and here are some links to you tube featuring some of their excellent new album.
[link] (album Taster)
[link] The Wheel of Time Comes Around
[link] The Song Of The Universe
and at the time I thought it would be relatively quick to finish, which goes to show how wrong you can be sometimes. Firstly, the band are perfectionists (I am sure they won't mind me saying this), however, the picture itself was done relatively quickly and was completed over 18 months ago to everybody's satisfaction. But of course the picture is not the entire job, there are also the band photos and inlays, CD labels and my own personal bugbear, TYPOGRAPHY!
I ought to explain that I started my working career as a graphic designer, but gave it up because I found gardening less stressful. Specifically the most stressful thing in graphic design was, and is, TYPOGRAPHY! In TYPOGRAPHY, the chances for things going wrong increase exponentially with every letter you commit to page. These days, of course, TYPOGRAPHY can be handled by your very helpful computer, but when I were a lad, mistakes had to be put right with a scalpel and a microscopically small piece of paper with a letter attached, which was then glued to the copy. This process has naturally left psychological scarring and even though Photoshop makes correcting errant TYPOGRAPHY a breeze, previous experience leads to a heightening of blood pressure and a perceptible shaking of the entire body. Roses are restful. Grass is restful. Even lawnmowers, strange as it may seem, can be restful by comparison to TYPOGRAPHY!
Enough. The trouble is, if a friend asks you to do a little TYPOGRAPHY (not realising the psychological trauma which will ensue), of course one feels obliged to help and the whole thing starts again. In the case of this album, the problem was that every time I finished the TYPOGRAPHY, their guitarist, John, would ring up and tell me that they'd remixed the track(s), there was a new singer/guitarist/tea boy and could I please rearrange the TYPOGRAPHY accordingly. But finally, it was done. Or so I thought . . . . . .
If you look at the title of the picture, you will notice that it is called "The Wheel of Time Comes Around". Now, I think that's a pretty smart title and it certainly gave me something to get my teeth into when I did the picture. The album was originally going to be called "The Wheel of Time". Unfortunately, there is a series of novels under the same name by the now deceased author, Robert Jordan, and the band were concerned that if they used the title, there might be threat of legal action (Some of them had had their fingers burned before).
I think that a sequence of words like "the wheel of time", as a phrase, has been around long enough to be considered in 'everyday usage' and the band were, I suspect, thinking about it in terms of its origins in Eastern philosophy. I know that in conversations I had with them, they had never even heard of a certain series of novels. My own view is that it has become pretty crazy when a commercial organisation can declare ownership of parts of the English language (think of the letter i and a certain well known fruit!).
I think the band were fairly p....d off.
My picture now adorns the cover of a CD entitled "Don't Mention Rock and Roll". I know how they feel.
As a matter of interest, Clear Blue Sky have had some interesting artists do covers for their earlier work.
I am following in some quite well known footsteps.
Roger Dean
and John Pitre