Album artwork of the week: Washed Out's Paracosm

The music business may be mainly about downloads these days, but a decent album cover design remains vital to the success of a new release, and a recent revival in vinyl has guaranteed a future for the discipline. Every week we pick our favourite new album artwork, and today we take a look at 'Paracosm' from American electronic musician Ernest Greene, aka Washed Out.

"Ernest really wanted the art to look natural and low-fi," explains designer Sara Cwynar. "He wrote all the songs in a house in the country outside Athens, Georgia looking out into a lush natural setting and wanted the art to reflect the surreal, natural landscape where the songs were made, and also the warmer, analog instruments he used for this record."

Cwynar worked with found images of flowers from the New York Public Library and manipulated the images in Photoshop and with some hand drawing to push the illustrations to look more surreal than the found pictures.

She then layered them into the pattern to create the cover, with the designers at music label Sub Pop adding the typography.

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Have you spotted some inspiring album artwork? Let us know in the comments box below!