Arisen From Nothing - Arisen From Nothing — Photography, Logo & EP Design

Photographer, Designer & Mix EngineerJohn S. Eldridge, Jr.

Arisen From Nothing were a rock band out of the Pacific Northwest. I worked with them from 2011 through 2016 under my own studio, Inkboard Design — shooting their live shows, running press and promo sessions, designing their logotype, their show posters and the sleeve for their EP, and mixing two tracks on that record.

Most of it was unpaid. I took it on to build a body of music-industry work and to open doors with other bands, with the idea that it might lead to a larger record design project. That never materialised.

The run was not evenly spread. The bulk of it lands between 2011 and 2013 — a dense stretch of bar shows, festival dates, a summer tour and the release night — then the design work carries into 2014 with the EP, and there is a single reunion date in March 2016. The training was in the density, not the duration: enough shows close together that I stopped thinking about the camera.

What follows is a selection, not the archive. Several nights I shot are not represented here yet.

Two pieces of artwork recur in these photographs that I did not make. The band already had an engraved crest — Surrectum Ex Nihilum, In Nothing We Trust — applied to the bass drum head and an amp cabinet before I arrived. The skull-and-revolvers emblem on the EP front was supplied to me to build around. The photographs are mine and the sleeve layout is mine. Those two marks are theirs.

Hempfest, the Hard Rock Cafe, Studio 7 and Flight's.

Outdoor festival daylight at one end of the range, small rooms running whatever the house rig happened to be at the other. Access varied just as much — sometimes a pit, sometimes wherever there was space to stand. The job never changed: work with the light that is already in the room, because you do not get to adjust it and you do not get a second take.

Hempfest, Seattle — guitarist from below against open sky, which is the one lighting condition you cannot negotiate with.

Wider on the festival stage, banners and daylight competing for the background.

The drummer from behind the kit, pushed to high-contrast black and white.

Same position, printed harder — grain and blown highlights left in on purpose.

The Hard Rock Cafe marquee with the band's name on the reader board. Worth stopping for before you go inside.

Vocalist washed in green from the house rig, kit visible behind him.

The venue's logo painted on the brick wall — a room detail that dates and places the whole set.

Vocalist under magenta, cropped tight enough that the colour becomes the subject.

The crowd at Flight's, in costume. Documenting the room is part of documenting the show.

A punter in body paint, entirely committed. Not every night calls for this.

Regular at the bar, playing to the camera the moment she saw it.

Guitarist mid-set in black and white, the venue's clutter falling away behind him.

There is also an outdoor set in the archive I can place in the same run but cannot pin to a venue with any confidence, so I am not going to guess at one. Full sun, no rig, nothing to work with but the time of day.

Bassist mid-set in full outdoor daylight — no house rig to work with, just sun.

Wider frame from the same outdoor set, stage and PA stack together.

Guitarist against open sky, shot low so the horizon falls out of the frame.

The night In Nothing We Trust came out, the band played Hailey's. I covered the whole day rather than just the set, which is where the useful pictures usually are — load-in, an empty room at soundcheck, gear staged against a wall, and the merch table laid out before anyone was let in.

Their engraved crest turns up again here, printed on the amp cabinet. Again: mine is the photograph, not the mark.

Load-in at Hailey's. Amp cabinet, staged kit, open cases. The engraved crest on the cabinet is the band's artwork, not mine.

Soundcheck in an empty room, hours before doors. This is most of what a release night actually looks like.

Bass laid across a case in the dark, the one deliberately still frame of the night.

The bass player restringing side-stage while the kit gets set behind him.

The merch table before doors — CDs, shirts, stickers, challenge coins and a card reader. The night the record went out.

The live coverage was half the job. The band also needed images they could hand to venues, put in a media kit, and run online. That produced several sets — a press selection, a black and white series against a bare wall with a variant cut for folio use, a colour take from the same session, and a group of later selects.

Studio 7 was the one venue where the portraits mattered more than the set. Its loading door and sticker wall made a better backdrop than anything I could have built.

The sticker wall at Studio 7 — years of touring bands layered over each other.

Band portrait against the venue's roll-up loading door, black and white.

The same setup in colour, the four of them lined out across the door.

Silhouettes against a broken sky — the frame from that session I would still shoot the same way.

The bass drum head, lit by whatever was left of the house rig. The engraved crest — Surrectum Ex Nihilum, Novus Ordo Seclorum, Nihilum Credimus, In Nothing We Trust — is the band's own artwork. I only photographed it. [wide]

Vocalist mid-phrase, tight and high-contrast, the room behind him thrown away to black.

Drummer mid-set at Flight's, shot past the kit with the venue's own drum-riser sign in frame.

Guitarist stage right, backlit hard enough that the instrument reads before the player does.

Guitarist in profile against a dark wall — one of the quieter frames in the set.

Full band from the floor in a low-ceilinged bar, the room's own signage catching the flash.

Cymbals and hardware in close, no player — the kind of detail a media kit needs and never asks for.

Vertical frame of a mic stand and monitor edge, shot for a narrow column layout.

Promo session — the four of them against a bare exterior wall, flat daylight, no styling.

Same session, tighter grouping, shot to sit above a fold in a press sheet.

The folio crop of that frame — recut vertical so the group still reads at page width.

Loosest of the wall frames, with enough air around the group to drop type into.

The colour take from the same session, kept warm rather than graded toward the record's palette.

Not a studio frame — the vocalist live and low-angle, against a bar wall papered in beer signage. It ended up in the promo selects because it out-performed the posed work.

Live, treated with selective colour so the tattoos and the flame graphic on the bass drum carry while the room drops back to grey.

The logotype saw more use than anything else I made for them. The bass player already used an anarchy symbol, so I built the wordmark around it instead of replacing it — ARISEN FROM NOTHING set in a spray-spatter treatment with the anarchy A leading the line. I drew it in black and white so it would sit on either background.

The logotype I designed for the band, black version. The anarchy A came from the bass player, who already used the symbol. [small]

It had to survive being reproduced badly. A one-colour screen print at chest width was the hardest test, so that is the one I mocked up first.

Shirt mockup — the logotype alone, small and across the chest, to show the band how little it needed. [small]

The EP came in 2014. I designed the sleeve as a single wrap, front and back panel together: the tracklist, the credits, the ghosted song titles running behind the type, and the cracked ground the whole thing sits on. The emblem at the centre was supplied by the band and I built the layout around it. Inkboard Design is credited on the back panel.

I also mixed and mastered two tracks on that release — the Indigo Mix versions of Bring the War and In Nothing We Trust. TJ Hill recorded, mixed and mastered the rest of the record.

EP sleeve, 2014 — the full wrap, back panel left and front panel right. Layout, typography and logo are mine; the skull-and-revolvers emblem was supplied by the band. [wide]

EP presentation mockup: front and back of the sleeve as a physical card wallet. The back carries the tracklist, the band credits and the Inkboard Design mark. [wide]

Show posters

Three posters over 2013. They are the pieces of this job that came with real constraints: a fixed date, a venue's own branding to sit alongside, support acts to rank, sponsors to place, and a reader who is looking at it for about a second and a half on the way past.

The Hard Rock Cafe date had the most supplied material to absorb — the venue's logo, three support-act marks and a ticketing mark, none of them designed to live together. I built the layout around the band photograph and let the treated brick carry the rest.

Hard Rock Cafe Seattle show poster. My layout and typography, my logotype and band photograph; the venue, support-act and ticketing marks were supplied. [tall]

The Summer Inquisition tour poster had the opposite problem: five dates and five venues to make legible, with no room for a hierarchy trick. I staggered the dates left and right down the sheet so the eye walks the itinerary instead of reading a table, and set the sponsor marks in a single band along the foot.

Summer Inquisition Tour poster, 2013 — five dates set as a staggered calendar over a treated background, sponsor marks along the foot. [tall]

The Louie G's Pizza date in November went the other way again — a crowd frame as the whole background, a chiselled wordmark rather than the spray logotype, and the band's own crest ghosted behind it.

Louie G's Pizza, November 2013. Chiselled wordmark over a crowd frame, with the band's crest behind it and three support acts blocked across the bottom. [tall]

Social

For social media I built a banner around a treated close-up, running the wordmark across it with the band's seal set into the corner.

Social banner — my composition and wordmark over a treated eye image. The seal top-left is the band's own. [wide]

live music photographypromo photographylogo designep artworksocial mediaposter designband brandingmixing

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