It isn’t every day that you get to work with world renowned percussion soloist and concert marimbist. But that is exactly what I got to do when Tom Burritt needed new artwork for his upcoming CD release, Groundlines.
With such an album title, I knew that we needed warm earth tones and preferably a lot of rock which is far superior to dirt in many cases… including this one. Tom told me about a place out in The-Middle-of-Nowhere, Central Texas that served as an amazing arts and antique community called Round Top. In Round Top, there is an area called Festival Hill which has an amazing concert hall that looks like it straight out of Lord of the Rings and a chapel hall that was originally built in 1883 before it was moved to Festival Hill. The area underneath the chapel is now a coffee shop with great stone arches and a vaulted ceilings of stone. Best yet, it was remarkably cooler than the 100 or so degrees that the Texas summer was throwing at us.
We had a relatively small shot list: a image of Tom with is marimba, a couple of portraits of Tom with a relatively clean background for copy text and an image of his mallets that could be used as the art on the actual CD. Here is the first shot that we put together for the album cover, followed by what it looked like after the title and other text was added in by a graphic designer later.
With the two following portraits of Tom that we did inside the actual coffee shop, we allowed plenty of space on the stone walls to add track listings and write ups later.
We were trying to find a good way to incorporate Tom’s signature mallets. I noticed that the paving stones that made up the floor were nice and textures with the scrapes and scratches of many feet and chairs. So after choosing the most optimal paving stone, we placed the mallets down on the floor.
The images turned out great; we wrapped up and went to the local hangout for a bite to eat and a cold beer. Thanks Tom for the great shoot and good time.
You can listen to Tom’s new CD here.