mattias norén| visual artist

My creative journey to the creation of Architechts of a new weave.

It's now 25 years since I made my first cover for Evergrey, In search of truth. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then and the older I get, the more I want to explore what can be done with an album cover. It's easy to get stuck in old habits but I'm driven by trying new things. Many artists develop a typical style and that's fantastic. I'm more attracted to being as versatile as possible but still always delivering good results.

I had just bought a luxury drawing monitor from Wacom and started painting digitally seriously when AI made its inroads and suddenly I completely lost the desire to paint digitally. It was possible to create images that looked a lot like digitally painted covers just by writing a prompt. That's when I decided to learn to paint traditionally instead. AI is getting better and better, but so far at least a trained eye can tell a traditional painting from an AI image.

I thought about whether to try oil, acrylic or watercolor and finally chose watercolor. To an outsider, it can easily be seen as the easiest medium, but after a while I realized that it was the most difficult. Once the paint is on the paper, there is not much you can do to save a mistake. With oil and acrylic, you just have to paint another layer on top until you get it the way you want it.

Painting good portraits in watercolor is probably the hardest thing you can do. And that's why I decided to paint no less than 100 watercolor portraits over the course of a year. It was a fantastic school and I really felt how the training paid off. There were hours of YouTube videos and frantic training and experimentation to get that wonderful feeling that a watercolor painting can really give. When you paint with oil, you control every brushstroke. When you paint watercolor, you first control a little and tell the paint and water what you want it to do, then it takes on a life of its own in a way. If you succeed, you are richly rewarded, but if you fail, it is a disaster and there is little you can do to save it.

Some early paintings

After some practice

Tom saw one of the more imaginative portraits I had done and that was where the idea was born to do something similar for the Silent Skies album "Dormant", which thus became my first cover made in watercolor, and I have to say that it is the most fun project I have ever done. Not least because I absolutely love the music and could listen to it while I painted. When I have created most of my covers, I have not heard a single note from the album. Having a long-term collaboration with someone who trusts you so much that you get to listen to the music as soon as it is finished is fantastic for creativity. Especially if it is one that in this case is among the best you have ever heard.

Then came the question of doing the cover for Evergrey's "Theories of Emptiness". I first thought we would use watercolor for that cover too, but we ended up doing something completely different, and it became my most minimalist cover to date. Mine and Evergrey's "The dark side of the moon" in a way. Keeping it simple is often the hardest thing. It was a cover that was loved by some while others didn't understand it at all. And that was probably the point in a way. To evoke emotions. That's the whole point of art. To make people react.

I continued to do some covers with watercolor and felt like I had found a home in my creation. Very proud of the covers I've done for, for example, Ihlo, Another age and PreHistoric animals. Being able to paint traditionally but also having the knowledge to work digitally and fine-tune the paintings afterwards is how I prefer to work right now. You can get them as good as you want, but that lovely hand-painted feeling is always there in the end result.

Tom's wishes for "Architects of the new weave" were "big and detailed". He mentioned some covers where he had sat and found detail after detail. In other words, the exact opposite of "Theories".

The idea was born with a figure with threads that led to pictures where each picture represented a song from the record. I bought a paper twice the size of any watercolor I had done before. I didn't even have a base big enough to tape the paper to, so I had to buy a second-hand tabletop to be able to work with the project. The plan was that the cover would only be a small part of the entire painting. I thought for a long time about how to make the best use of this. I don't know if it was the ultimate solution, but it was good enough. I divided it into six parts, of which the cover is only one of the parts.

Stay tuned for Part 2