Album Art of the Week: Believer – ‘Gabriel’
The art on Believer's comeback album gives us some wonderful contrast: all of the complexity is seen in the immense intricacy of linear blues, and is framed on the canvas of the model's skin. Simpler elements of the design, like the band name and album title, are all "rejected" and float outside.
I'm not one to diminish the roles of the artists involved, but I almost want to call this a photograph of great art rather than great art itself - and that's at least factually accurate, since very little post-production was involved. Instead the process relied on makeup, ram's horns (they were real) and lighting to create the image of Gabriel, as seen in this video of the photo session.
"The best thing about working on the cover art for the Believer album was that it allowed me to work with a great group of artists both at Eye Level Studio in California and the band in PA," Michael Rosner from Eye Level Studio told Noisecreep. "I do want to stress (because it caused us plenty to get it right) that the entire piece you see is a photo and no digital software was used to create the original work. We did eventually crop the photo and added the logo and title but that's it."