Night In Tokyo

Created for the Night in Tokyo EP by Piing. I borrowed inspiration from several vintage Japanese album covers by Hiroshi Nagai, the synthwave microgenere, and added my own personal take on Japanese-style typography with Roman graphemes.

The Main Portrait

I created the main portrait using Krita for the main sketch. I then used InvokeAI, a stable diffusion based inpainting tool, to add interesting textural elements such as the green nebulae reflected in the jacket collar, and the jacket zipper which is actually made up of tiny piano keys. I also tried modifying the hair with inpainting and got the headpiece, which I decided to keep in as it contributed to the overall retro-future aesthetic of the piece. I then went into DarkTable for post-processing, where the image was color graded to allow the complimentary purples and greens to stand out more.

The Side Panel

The side panel was wireframed and designed in Figma. I used vector assets from Pixbay to fill in whitespace. In line with the theme of the Album's main song, Night In Tokyo, a song about understanding one's self through sexual liberation, the vector art is intentionally provocative, in contrast with the main subject, who is dressed fairly conservatively.

Overall Composition

The cover art was finished within Figma, stacking the side panel on top of the main portrait. To add a sense of "vintageness", the composition was overlayed with a grain layer, a few light leaks, and a blur layer to remove the hard edges created by vector paths.