Tetris Attack Music Album Cover

I eluded in an earlier post about a Tetris Attack project. I have been working on a few drawings for the project. I got an okay from Xaleph, the project director, to post work in progress, so I'm posting my progress with the front album cover.

Inked cover

The project re-imagines music from the game Tetris Attack. What would the CD cover look like? I started exploring ideas with the sketches shown below. The front cover would showcase the characters, while the back cover would elaborate on the game and album's vibe.

The album will pay homage to Panel de Pon, the game from which Tetris Attack was developed. Drawing the main characters from both games was a start: Yoshi the dinosaur from Tetris Attack and Lip the flower fairy from Panel de Pon. The first 2 thumbnails were basically my getting familiar with the characters. I added puzzle tiles from the games in thumbnail #3.

First round of thumbnails

At the end of the first round, I concluded that the cover must have the following main elements: (1) the 2 characters and (2) the puzzle tiles.

The second round explored placement of these main elements. #1 added musical instruments as requested by Xaleph. #2 portrayed the characters as conductors (typical for music CD cover, I think). #3 was all about dynamic angle and spiral shape.

Thumbnails round 2

#1 was picked, so I proceeded with pencil sketch. The swirls were music bars with notes, another request from Xaleph. On actual size, however, the background looks rather empty. I needed to add elements that looked like something from the games.

I added a rounded rock for Yoshi to jump from. The foreground and midground looked empty, so I added flowers from Panel de Pon. Adding fluffy clouds to background sky felt natural. As final touches, I added bubbles from Tetris Attack title screen and some pollen from Panel do Pon title screen.

Pencil sketch

At this point, I recalled Xaleph's request to add the music instruments to reflect the musical nature of the album. So, as one extra final touch, I added the notes coming out of the trumpet. These notes are the tune played in game when there are enough matches to send a penalty block to the opponent.

It looks elaborate and complicated in pencil form. Once inked, it looks much simpler. With colors, it feels too simple! Yes, right now I'm working on coloring with cold sweats. But that will be a story for another post. See you then!