Illustration12 - Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds: Rings of Saturn

Out of the four songs I chose to illustrate for this brief, this is definitely the one I would say I was the least engaged with. Musically the song didn't really jump out at me, and the lyrics aren't rich with that much imagery to draw from. This close to the deadline though, I've just been trying to make the best of what I've got. The main driving force here was trying to create a surrealistic image to recreate the line in the song describing someone "dangling dreams off the rings of Saturn". I immediately thought of melty surrealism when I heard this line, and having researched the origin of this song, I found that its partly inspired by the death of his son.

This context gave me a lot more inspiration in terms of ideas for visuals, colour and composition. I wanted the planet and its rings to double as a baby mobile hanging over a crib with the many tendrils coming down. After getting some feedback from people, I've also been told that the image reminds them of models on display at 1940s and 50s World Fairs, that celebrated post war technology as the path to a brighter future.


This isn't something I really envisioned when I designed this cover, but I found it really interesting that people could take something like this away from it when that's not really what I intended. Its helped me realise my communication can always be clearer when working in a medium like this.