Creating Catharsis Cover

James and I created the cover art for his first cassette LP, Catharsis, in my dining room in Hopatcong.  This was early days of both Photoshop and the Internet.  I can’t remember if we sat down with the intention of creating an album cover, or we were just messing around.  But the above art started with a image of a tomato.

We started applying filters and tweaking the image and ended up with this:

Then we started experimenting with text overlays..

We started with the above text, and then started tweaking and applying textures..   We found this cool image of a dry lake bed:

Once we masked off the letters from this texture, we ended up with this:

Applying that directly onto the “tomato” image resulted in:

I don’t really remember the rationale, but we put a few more filters onto the text until we ended up with (what I believe is) the final art:

That’s at least how I remember it.  The dates on these files are from August 23rd, 1995, but I don’t know if that date is reliable.

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