The Scheme Of Things -EP Available Now.

Hey now. This is the second published CD packaging that I have designed and illustrated. But this–technically an EP–is special, because it is the work of my little brother, Eric Leva. I get to say little because he is younger than me.

Anyway, I’ll talk briefly about the music in a totally unbiased manner, let you have a quick listen, and then get onto the art. “Enter the Shell” wrote a review of the EP and said,

“The Scheme of Things EP is a record that you can’t help but be happy about. Every song is uplifting, light-hearted, heartwarming, and packed with quality musical accompaniment, that leaves you wanting more.” And you can read the rest of the review here.

Eric says that the EP is of the pop/folk variety, so if that sounds like something you would listen to play the sample below, then head on over to his website to hear more.

Okay! Onto the artwork.

This is what the finished outer packaging looks like, bleeds included. That while box is for the barcode. I wanted to keep this airy and atmospheric, while still giving everything a very flat cut-and-paste sort of style. All of the buildings were made with textured paper brushes. I used photoshop and illustrator to pull together the images and the text. When you open up the outer packaging, you will find this:

A very simple disk with a dream-like city floating around on it. You can view view the EP design in my graphic design gallery, or buy a copy of your own to look at whenever and wherever you want.

The Scheme Of Things -Ep, by Eric Leva is now available on itunes, amazon, bandcamp, storeenvy and through his website.

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End of the Year Crunch

Really only three more weeks until this semester is over, and everyone–both students and teachers–are feeling the pressure. Those poor graphic designers! They’re reviews are coming up this Thursday and my boyfriend has been in the studio non-stop for three days. Lots of majors are preparing for their portfolio reviews but none of them seem to be as much work as graphic design. I know for illustration, all we had to do was fill out a form and put all of our work into a canvas portfolio. The work required minimal preparation. These poor graphic designers have to create an entire presentation of their work and every aspect of it needs to be carefully designed and laid out. It’s like they have a whole extra project in showcasing their work.

I know that I as the end draws near, I will have a lot of tests and papers to prepare for. Luckily, I think that I only have one final exam to do in class. Then I have two take-home exams. But before I can even get to that I have at least 3 more major papers, a presentation, some sort of science project, a final illustration, and two lithographies to get done. This is not procrastination on my part at all. I am ahead of most in my work. This is the professors saving all of the hard stuff for the end. I don’t know why they do that.

I know that Illustration will be no problem. In that class, all of the assignments were spaced out evenly and I will have plenty of time to finish this last one. But most classes, I have not even been assigned my projects for the rest of the year, so I cannot even get started!! Lithography is very much troubling me. We need to do two state of this current project, and because we are working on a stone, and have never worked on stones before, we need a see a lot of demos. And we are encouraged to do a lot of the process in class. BUT we do not have enough class time to get it all in before the end of the year. So there’s going to be a lot of time spent outside of class trying to do something that we’ve never done before. And if we mess up there will be no one to help us!! Gah. I definitely do not have the confidence to print outside of class but I will almost certainly have to.

I just finished my second-to-last illustration and flapped it for the critique on Tuesday. I may wait to put up pictures of it though until after the crit. Incase there is anything i missed that should be fixed. I will give you all a word of advise. When removing masking tape from the edges of an artwork, always pull AWAY from the image area. Sometimes the tape will catch the surface of the paper and tare off the top layer. If you pull towards the image area, you now have a lovely gash running through your picture, but if you pull away, your image will remain untouched.

In other news, I posed in some photographs for a friend’s paintings today. That was awesome.

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