Ignorant Bliss Lost Sleep and Lost Days Sleeve Front Cover

After the initial concept art, which was very rough pencil drawings of the artwork ideas and layout, this is the first experiment with the front cover, to get an idea of how it's really going to look:
Initial experiment with front cover
I started with a pencil sketch and went over it with a blue crayon, and felt tips.

We decided we looked too angry in that picture - I hadn't really captured the feel I was trying to achieve of us going a bit wild and enjoying ourselves. It also didn't capture the feel of the music - this sort of look might have been OK if it had been a metal CD. This is supposed to be mellow.

We messed around with various pitiful facial expressions
Laughing face Cheesy face
I tried different materials
All crayon snowman
and ways of rendering the background
Rolling line-art hills
Shaded angular hills
before eventually settling on a look I was happy with.

Then a more practical matter came to the fore - how was I to get the composition of the work right, so that it would fit on the CD cover correctly and take up the right amount of space?

I considered doing separate drawings of the two snowmen and the background, scanning them into the computer, and compositing them there. This would have the advantage that I could play with the size and position right there on the front cover along with the title text. The problem I foresaw with this approach was that I didn't think I'd be able to draw the background correctly without already knowing the composition of the snowmen, and with the snowmen composited on the computer, and me drawing the background on paper, I just couldn't see how to get that to work. I could have composited what I had so far of the cover on the computer, printed that out, then drawn the background from that, but that had two problems

So I wound up doing pencil drawings of the two snowmen, cutting them out and arranging them as best I could by hand.
The two snowmen taped together
Check how straight the left and top edges of the IB logo are, not bad for freehand, eh?

When I was happy with that, I made a tracing of them onto the final piece of paper, again in pencil, and completed it by going over that with black felt tip and pencils in several shades of blue.
The completed final drawing
Check how non-straight the left and top edges of the IB logo are. :-( Well, it was morning by then, and I'd been up all night, that's my excuse. And wow! We have the same amount of hair in the final drawing as in the first! That's almost true to life. ;-)

Front cover