Week 12 – 05/05/2025

Wednesday 07/05/25 – Today I will create a small cover/logo for myself that will allow me to publish my tracks on Landr. This is the Metroid logo (which undergoes many small tweaks and stylisations depending on the era), and I plan on creating my own logo based off of this. I enjoy purple hues alot more than the reds, and so a lighter blue steel colour would fit instead of the greys.

These are E-Tanks (below) from the Metroid games that use pixels. Their design is relatively similar throughout the franchise, only ever shifting in colour when new palettes are introduced. I would love to use an ‘E’ as the album cover’s letter of choice because then I can call the release “Recharged”, a reference to remastering or giving new life to the tracks I chose to remodel. By Friday I should have a logo to work with using Clip Studio and my drawing tablet, and various tools I have at my disposal on the app.

Friday 09/05/25 –

I DID IT.

Informalities out of the way, I actually did this logo in two hours yesterday. I’m quite proud of it, and ontop of that, I made another track!

This is the cover for my Album, titled “Recharge”. There are a few things to talk about regarding the choices of shapes and colours, and I have screenshots of the process going along.

The three bars leading up to the “R” is a reference to how Metroid usually works health, measuring it in bars for how many energy tanks/capsules you have. In this case, Samus, or the protaganist, has four bars, about to gain five as the hand reaches for this orb I designed to replace the typical E-Tank look. Paired with a gaussian blur effect, this makes the orb look somewhat magical, rather than a scattered piece of technology, which is rather fitting for the whole “Otherworldly” theme, which could be magic, or something with a floatation device inside. Eitherway, I am proud of how this turned out, and I will post the screenshots below.

Initially, I worked the shapes and anatomy of the hand before adding any lines or details. I knew I wanted this to be the main eye-catcher of the album cover, so I made them as big as I could on a 3000×3000 canvas witthout touching the edges.
Then, using a colour palette from a “reconceptualized” design of Samus Aran, I had an analogous scheme that would work well. Note how I also began work on the Album name card in the top left, but it is positioned differently to the end-product. This is because in the midst of making the outlines and colour layers, text layers couldn’t be edited directly, and I had to find a workaround and start on it again. I also added an inner layer to the E-Tank, which was a darker colour to break up the shapes and see what I had.
For this progress check, I coloured in the card and E-Tank with similar colours, using the mostly enveloping (see colour wheel) purple-blue for a base, and then chose yellow to go along with it. Energy is usually measured in bright yellow in-game, so I chose Recharge and E to be yellow with slight orange borders that can be seen if one inspects closer. I also used the third (maroon) to border the E-Tank which is a lovely combination with the red, being easy on the eyes (especially when I chose to gaussian blur them in a later iteration).
I sped through the process of creating the hand’s lineart, colours and rendering – I chose for it to also use that same blue-purple and chose highlights of a light blue, with a deep purple for shadows. The flex-joint parts are just a simple black with purple shadows, and the steel parts are grey shadows with green-tinted white for scratchy, worn highlights.

That was the process for creating my Album cover, and I love my finished result. I also asked some people their opinions on it and they loved it – can’t post screenshots since they swore every two seconds.

With all my tracks done, all I need to do now is distribute them and then, I can write my evaluation. I spoke in an earlier weak about how Landr distribution works, so I’ll do it now.

(10 minutes later) Landr is very fussy about getting details right. I apparently already have something under ZebesDweller (artist name) and for that I can’t upload it? Strange, really.

Turns out their system for “using artist data” on the same five tracks is just not working, so I manually had to add the same info five times to the tracks. Annoying, but I’ve done it.

I won’t monetize it for now just because this is my first time using a distributor and I do not want to run into any legal trouble down the line.

And now, I await an email back.