Glass Candles - Album Art

CW: some cursing involved.

I’m so guilty of being a serial lurker here. I like sharing only the best of my work here since it’s not a ‘portfolio site’, where I can just dump finished art and call it a day. And BA also gives me the opportunity to talk about and interact with people in way more detail than I do/can elsewhere.

Glass Candles is a three-track EP that I co-wrote and produced with Zain Hayat. It’s out on 22.2.22 on all major streaming platforms. Here’s a short snippet of what it sounds like. IDM/Experimental, New Age Electronica. Both of us are always pushing the envelope of “acceptable” sounds and concepts outward.

FINAL ARTWORK

The album art marks a strong diversion from my usual style, which is deeply symbolic and abstracted. Glass Candles’ artwork is… just that: Glass Candles. No more, no less. The other details (climbing ropes tied to fragile candles, the axe, melting snow) are all atmospheric. Which is why Zain and I decided to have no text in the cover. No explanation, all feeling.

BREAKDOWN

If you’re on a previous-gen (twice over) GPU, you know the pain of not being able to push adaptive subdiv, or even use it at all. Thankfully, the devs built in some fucking excellent optimization with Cycles X. I was able to load three (3) whole displacement textures that work at closeups, as opposed to the usual 0. And in my experience, I don’t really need 8k+ textures when Normal maps are filling in the details.

The shading is fairly straightforward. Only extra note is layers of procedural masks that drive the transition between snowy ground, puddles, to wet pebbles.

Standard Nishita sky texture for the main source of light. It’s a cold, cold sunset set at 8858m. Of course you’d never see pebbles up there unless there was extensive global warming. Atmospheric details. + Spot and Area lights for accent (gold) lighting so the glass really fucking pops out at you.

The camera emulates a BMPCC 4k (Blender has had excellent camera presets for a long time) with a long anamorphic lens. A simple tweak to the bokeh ratio from 1.0 to 0.4255 (1/2.35) gives a narrowed bokeh which is customarily seen in anamorphic lenses.

My final comp is done in AfterEffects (I know I know, don’t@me). It just has better bit-depth handling. Photoshop sucks ASS at this. Cryptomatte doesn’t even load properly and when it does, it’s sloww. Someday I’ll switch to Nuke and then the world is gonna change forever, okay? Okay.

Here’s a quick cut of what this all looks like put together, including the earlier versions of the artwork.

Thanks for reading till the end, if you have any questions please just ask. :slight_smile:

SAVE THE DATE.
22.2.22

GLASS CANDLES
Written and produced by Niranjan Raghu & Zain Hayat
Mastering by Zain Hayat
Artwork by Niranjan Raghu

I highly encourage you to follow Zain: Instagram | Twitter | Bandcamp
And if you feel like it, find me here: Instagram | Twitter | ArtStation

– Niranjan Raghu

12 Likes

Wow! Such a moody and beautiful piece!

Thanks! :smiley:

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I featured you on BlenderNation, have a great weekend!