Soundtracks VII The Finale

Okay we're wrapping up our look at the music behind the sleeves with this song from my mother's favorite duo Ferrante & Teicher from the album Dial 'M' for Music. Cover and lettering by his royal majesty Peter Palombi.

Soundtracks VI

Run for your lives it's a power ballad! Jefferson Starship's Caroline from the Dragonfly album.It's a wonder Peter Lloyd didn't chuck it all in after receiving such a cross-wired schizophrenic brief from the band members.

Overspray Soundtracks V

Today it's 1973's Sport from the album Hustler's Convention by Lightnin' Rod. Former member of the mighty Last Poets, backed up by Kool and the Gang featuring a Cineramic gatefold cover illustration by Dave Willardson.

Overspray Soundtracks IV

Today's track is Billy Jack from my favorite Curtis Mayfield album There's No Place Like America Today. I love how Palombi differed his painting technique for the glossily sprayed crackers in the billboard, and the hand painted watercolor used for the poor folks in the breadline.

Overspray Soundtracks III

Pour a little Polo for Men into the hot tub and switch on Friends and Strangers by Ronnie Laws. The original painting for this blew my mind when viewing it for the first time hanging on Peter Lloyd's living room wall in Eugene, Oregon. He tells a great story about how the cover concept came about in his interview in Overspray.

Overspray Soundtracks II

Slip on your cranberry suede fringed boots and have a listen to Gentle Giant's The Advent of Panurge from their 1972 album Octopus. This epic die-cut cover was painted by Charles White III with lettering by Michael Doret.

Overspray Soundtracks I

This is the first post in a series of Overspray Soundtracks. A chance to listen to some of the funky 70s albums whose cover art is featured in Overspray. Today's track is Are You Ready by Pacific Gas and Electric from 1970.

Image Restoration IV

Once the colors are corrected I went in to do any 'spotting' or cleaning up of blemishes. An unforeseen problem with retouching the work in Overspray, was not being able to use Photoshop's dust and scratches filter, which normally would have been a simple process. But airbrush art is composed of tiny paint speckles which would be mistaken by the filter as dust particles, thus causing over-smoothing, and robbing the illustration of its snap. So all spotting needed to be done by hand.

The before and after images here are easier to study when magnified

Image Restoration III

I then adjusted the overall levels of the cyan channel, bringing the shadow slider up to where the darkest shadow detail remained in the image. This usually gives you an indication of whether an image still retains enough information to work with.

So now it's possible to see a wider range of hues. There's a little green in the glass, and the outer outline ring of the circle is a similar color. The skin tones in the hand are also looking much better. Dave usually uses very bright colors, so I can tell that the original didn't look this somber originally. My hunch is that the outer ring should be blue-green along with parts of the glass, and perhaps the fill color within the circle should be a bit less green.

It's become apparent that I'll need to adjust portions of the illustration separately, then merge them together into a single image. The 3rd image has had the cyan increased, and shows the parts that didn't need more blue being erased. This is repeated for every element that needs individualized tweaking - maybe 5-6 components.

Image Restoration II

This caused the image to become oversaturated, so I reduced that a bit as well.

Now I could tell what shape the overall color was in. It was instantly obvious that the blues had faded quite severely, so I opened up the cyan channel to see how it looked.

Eek!

Image Restoration

The most time consuming portion of assembling Overspray was ensuring that all the paintings were in good shape and ready for print. As some pieces are nearly 40 years old, they required a bit of help in the retouching department. Dave Willardson had done an excellent job of archiving all of his work onto 4x5 transparencies which we sent to Singapore for drum scanning. But even so there were still a few that required restoration work.

This is what the original transparency looks like. Pretty severe fading, probably due to improper finishing during film processing. But this illustration is one of my favorite early pieces by Dave and I wanted to include it.

The first step was to remove the overall color cast that had been caused by the fading. I could tell the background was once white, so I reduced the red cast until it was neutral, and adjusted the shadow levels.

Real Color

Kind of shocking while working on the book, to see what the original paintings look like, compared to the image that ended up being printed in not the most accurate fashion.

Peter Lloyd's illustration for this Kansas album cover is a good example. Never seen the little edge of the earth until now either.

Toga Brava Suite

Portrait of Duke Ellington painted by David Willardson for the Toga Brava Suite album cover. This is one of two paintings Dave completed overnight for the sleeve.

Peter Palombi

One of my favorite images from the book. Peter Palombi's painting for the Eddie Harris album Is It In.

Pink Jumpsuits

Peter Lloyd's famous painting for Rod Stewart's Atlantic Crossing. Unbelievably painted over a weekend without the aid of a preparatory color sketch. That's when illustrators were MEN !

Cover 1: Peter Palombi

Overspray has 4 different covers. This one is by Peter Palombi originally used for the album That Is Why You're Overweight, later to be printed as a poster and card by the fantastic Paper Moon graphics. I'll upload the other three covers soon.