480-REBORN's front cover, inspired by a mix of western comics and Japanese anime/manga
480-REBORN's back cover featuring the album credits, tracklist, and various more character illustrations
480-REBORN is a hip-hop album by rapper K-KUMA, a friend and frequent client of mine. His music and aesthetics are heavily inspired by the various anime and comic series he enjoys, including shows like Dragon Ball Z and One Piece. I met him at a previous job as a coworker, and we became good friends bonding over our mutual love of these fun stories and their cool characters.
K-KUMA's albums all contain stories playing out in the background of songs, told through the song titles, covers, lyrics, and overall themes. These stories are full of original characters, some of which I helped him design and write out. While we haven't gotten to do all we'd like to with these characters, illustrating them so far has been very fun. I really enjoy helping other passionate people bring their ideas to life, it's one of the best parts of drawing in my opinion.
After already having released a couple singles with my art leading up to the release of 480-REBORN, we decided we needed to go all-out with this one. We settled on a comic-page look, with each panel showing off prominent characters to the story. The back shows the remaining cast, each representing a different corrupted version of various Adrinka symbols.
As the album neared release, we designed a simple little announcement post he could share on social media and even put together a neat little video to use with the Spotify Canvas feature, which would replace the stock solid background color with swirling purple.
A simple announcement image designed for easy sharing on Kuma's social medias
The face at the top of the cover before being redrawn and having all the extra visual effects applied. The eye on the right side of this face was my profile picture on social medias for a while, I just really liked how it looked