The initial brief for the cover which was from Carl, Insision's singer was that there be a circle of fleshy heads in pain, anger, tortured and demonic. Inside the circle would be a partially visible demon. After my initial sketch was approved, (umm...lost that - sorry!) I began the ground work for the illustration.

Four heads were created in Poser, (a figure building application), these were then exported as Wavefront Object files.

The Wavefront files were then imported into Bryce, a 3D landscape generator, (while it is mainly used for landscapes it is a quick way to position and light 3D compositions). The sphere in the centre of the image represents the light source, I decided to only light the image from the centre in order to give it a dramatic feel to it. The working space of the image was set at 750x750 pixels and rendered out at twice size to give an output size of 12x12cm

In Adobe Photoshop I created a background from an old texture file I had on a CD and added a dark central section to give the appearance of a tunnel/void from which the main demon would appear, the "tunnel" appeared flat so I used Photoshop pinch filter to "suck" the central section of the texture into the void.



I then added the Bryce render over the top of the background texture and erased parts of the heads to blend in more with the background.

With all the 3D work out of the way I began adding in the details to the heads using a Wacom tablet, I also darkened the outer edges of the image to concentrate the focus of attention on the central areas of the image, at this point I re-scaled the heads.
It was felt that the colours were too bright, so I added a layer of 50% gray to the top layer of the photoshop file and used the 'color' option for the layer, this would have made the image grayscale, but after reducing the layer opacity slider to 50% a suitable colour spectrum was created. The demon in the centre was added using the same Poser, Bryce, Photoshop routine I had used for the circle of heads.

25 layout versions were tried before the one seen below was decided upon, one of which was increasing the band logo to fill the cetral void and removing the central demon completely, (a layout I actually preferred to the final one). The album title was scrawled in fineliner on a sheet of paper and scanned into the image.

Finally something needed to be done with the overall feel of the cover as it was too "clean", so I used a photo of a tree trunk I had to create a texture. This final layer used the overlay' option to make the demons appear battered and torn.