CD artwork for the 2011 album release of ‘Goro le Goro’ by the London Bulgarian Choir.

Capturing the essence of the forest

Goro Le Goro takes us to the cool, green forests of Bulgaria where heroes roam, nightingales sing and cherry trees bear fruit. Distant voices singing ‘on high’ cut through the mist and the sunshine reveals beautiful maidens. But the forest is also a place for men so there are songs of rampant flirting and seduction, of fighting for freedom from the Ottoman Turks… and of knitting, manfully

After the success of winning the BBC Choir of the year in the open category in 2006, and the success of the first London Bulgarian Choir album ‘Alyana Galyana‘ in 2008, I was really happy to take part in designing the artwork for the next album ‘Goro le Goro’. I had created the CD artwork for the first album in Adobe Illustrator and InDes

I had created the CD artwork for the first album in Adobe Illustrator and InDesign. By 2011 I had migrated most of my design practice into and open source toolset. I found that I was able to use Inkscape to produce the front cover and Scribus for the booklet artwork. The challenge was to convert images to CMYK colour as Inkscape doesn’t have native support for it. I used another open source image editing tool called Krita for this. View Goro le Goro on Bandcamp.

When approaching the CD artwork, I was keen to capture the essence of the longing that came through the music. There was also an opportunity to have both the girl in ‘Alyana Galyana’ and the man in the ‘Goro le Goro’ to gaze at each other in some way since they were both created in the same style. I am really proud of this design, all the more knowing that it is an open source success. Perhaps the next CD artwork will feature children. Find out more about the London Bulgarian Choir.