In April 2023, I was listening to the band Sleep Token on repeat in anticipation of their upcoming album Take Me Back To Eden. I decided I wanted to create a poster design based on one of their songs, and ultimately went with “Like That” off of This Place Will Become Your Tomb. The line “fall into your eyes like a grave” particularly stuck out to me, so I used that as the basis.

When I started this, my main goals were to create a text-focused poster that incorporated visual motifs from the album artwork of This Place Will Become Your Tomb as well as their prior release, Sundowning, since it was meant to be a general sort of tribute piece to the band although it was based on a specific song. Because of this, I adopted the light-beam effects from the Sundowning album cover and the general color palette of the TPWBYT album cover as a starting point (pictures 1 & 2). 

The first step was creating the basic shapes in illustrator, in particular the gravestone, the light beams, and the eye (picture 3). From there, I pulled the elements I’d created into photoshop and added in some text fit to the shape of the grave, a diver to fit with the aquatic themes of the TPWBYT album cover, and a distorted a vectorized iris texture to fit onto the eye to make it look more detailed (picture 4). 

As I continued to progress, I added an aquatic background, some extra shading and details on the tombstone, text, and diver, and a pillar of bubble seemingly rising out of the pupil to fit into the aquatic theme. I also added shading and highlights with a bit of noise applied to add some texture to the composition (picture 5).