Janus

Created for the Album by Piing featuring Kouya. For this piece, I wanted to combine art deco with a style I call pantheistic surrealism.

Pantheistic Surrealism

Pantheism is the belief that divinity does not fall into the hands of a singular entity, but instead lies in everything. I attempted to combine this dogma with the surrealist style, which tries to represent a subconscious perception of the world. Salvador Dali was the main surrealist painter I took inspiration from when developing this style. I was also inspired by the fact that we are literal stardust that became a means for the universe to observe its own beauty.

Background Technique

The portrait is a photobash of four images. The first is the background gradient, which I created in Krita. Second and third were the portrait and a picture of a nebulae respectively. The portrait was generated using diffusion in order to avoid accidentally using someone's likeness. The fourth image is an edit of the portrait I did in Krita that was made to resemble a ghost.

Within Krita, I edited out the background of the portrait and combined it with the gradient, color grading the portrait in order to make it look seamless. Then, I used the clone tool, the dodge and burn tool, soft light blend modes, various masks, and warping in order to make the nebulae look as though it was emerging from and was made from the woman's hair. I then incorporated the ghostly image by using a gradient mask to only show the face, which fades into nothing. I then used the soft light blend mode to incorporate it with the rest of the image.

The Text

All text art was done in Figma. The text is a lengthened form of the Marcellus font. The gold characters were masks for a gold texture I created in Krita using a simple gradient and grain. The colored characters are a mask for a copy of the background that has been flipped vertically and upside down. I decided to actually take the fourth image from the background photobash and remove it from the background, instead placing it a layer above the text, adding the ghostly blue appearance to the right side of the entire cover.

Overall Composition

To finish out the composition, I also ended up putting a paper texture above the text along with a screen blend mode. After doing some final color grading and adding a slight blur, the front was done. I used the same methods to create the back, but instead of having a portrait or text, I created art deco vectors in Figma and applied the same effects to them that I did the gold text, and used them to embellish the back.