Japanese illustrator transforms super-rough CD jacket concept sketch into gorgeous art

Casey Baseel

Mar 15, 2017

A few scribbles and bullet points were all this amazing artist needed.

Most people would say that being an illustrator is an especially creative line of work. However, when it comes to producing drawings on a commission, the creative process doesn’t take place entirely inside the artist’s head.

For commercial projects, the artist has to collaborate with clients, who ostensibly has some idea of what they want but lack the artistic capabilities to arrive at a comprehensive vision and transfer those ideas to paper. Still, that doesn’t mean the artist’s job is an easy one, since sometimes clients can provide only the vaguest details as a starting point.

Take, for example, Japanese Twitter user and singer, songwriter, and Vocaloid music producer Madoka Kurosawa, whose resume includes the song “No Arugoburu Atonement Doll,” with vocals by Hatsune Miku.

Kurosawa has a new song coming out on April 30 titled “A Supper of Snake Eyes” (“Hebi no Me no Bansan” in Japanese. For the jacket cover artwork, the instructions she gave the illustrator were:

● A person and skull that will grab people’s attention, with a design that has sort of a vignette framing to it (to draw attention to the center of the jacket).
● I’m undecided about the positioning, orientation, and font size for the album title text.
● A person (female). Undecided about hairstyle and color but wearing gothic clothing.
● A motif that includes flowers or eating utensils or something.
● An overall dark-color image.

She also supplied a very rough, black-and-white concept sketch, which can be seen on the left half of the tweet below. From that, the artist she hired produced the lavish illustration shown on the right.

“Illustrators are really amazing…” gushed Kurosawa. “Based on the image I had in my head, I made such a pitiful concept sketch, but the artist was able to draw so much out of it.

We have to agree. When your illustrator can find a way to implement your suggestion of “eating utensils” into something with serious visual impact, you know you’ve found a genuinely talented individual, and let this be further proof that great art can sometime be born from even the most unpolished of ideas.