Story Behind Artwork For Only With You

Now it’s quite likely that you’ve seen my lyric video Only With You – which is Track 4 on my new album Breathe. And although there’s a story behind this song, today I thought you might like something different. To see the journey the artwork has taken to arrive in this video.

Here is the starting point, this black and white photo from the original photo shoot back in 2000. Taken at home with Queenie – Mum’s beautiful baby grand piano. I wrote so many songs on this wonderful piano.

As you can see, it’s not a great photo. But as I only have so many pictures from when I was playing, I need to be creative! So the process begins.

I got lovely Kostas to improve the clarity of the photo and take out the background…

I desperately wanted to get some colour into the picture, so I used Photoshop and an app called Prisma to add some effects. I then got to this…

I wanted to try for more colour, so kept experimenting. Look at these fabulous colour pops!

Now I was ready to pass it over to Tanya, my artist. She was then able to paint the image, improve the quality, and make the picture digital with lots of lovely pixels.

After some revisions, these were the two finished images Tanya painted. You can see one is more impressionistic…

I made my choice between the two paintings and then played around some more. I vibrancy, colour and other highlights. I also decided I’d like to face the other way for a change!

And that was it, the artwork was ready. 👍

Here is the final version I used in the video. This image will also be one of the artwork postcards coming in the Special Signed CD Package of Breathe.

I hope you enjoyed seeing the process of the artwork I used for this video. It’s incredible what that rather poor image has become. I am thrilled with it. I just love the colours. I hope you like it too and that you enjoy the video and my song Only With You.