The Mitguards - About The Artwork On Nobody's Fool

About The Artwork
Tom Bishop

Nobody's Fool, Cover

Nobody's Fool

The central image on the cover of The Mitguards’ CD Nobody’s Fool caught both the eye and the imagination of Chris and Deb the first time I showed them the picture. It’s an image I captured at a lonely, deserted ranch house in South Park. The heart is carved from very hard lath and plaster, which required a lot of effort, but the broken slats and scratched denials seem to indicate the carver had a distinct change of heart. After struggling with which font to use for the lettering of the title, it occurred to me that the image itself contained a font of sorts. (The most obvious place is in the “No” on the wall and the “Nobody” in the title.) Deb devised the snake’s shape, but, using a process I can’t seem to replicate, I created its rainbow pattern using the Adobe software on my computer. The sky background is based on a sunrise photo I took in Glacier National Park, MT.

Nobody's Fool, Back Cover

The songs on the CD don’t deal with a lot of togetherness issues, so we couldn’t very well take a picture of the two of them smiling and happy. I thought we could take a picture of the two of them sitting at a bar, but finding a bar that would work proved difficult—that is, until Deb suggested we just use the wet bar in the basement of their house in Manitou. I replaced the back wall with digitally generated black bricks, to which I added some small spots of light and the hand-lettering of the title, which would have been much easier to do with chalk on actual brick. But the hardest thing about the photo was getting Deb and Chris to quit smiling long enough to take the picture.

Nobody's Fool, Inside Cover

Wanting to lighten the tone a bit, we decided to take a photo based on the song “Dancin’ On That Wooden Floor,” and discovered, in another flash of brilliance, that the wooden floor at their house would work great, except for the fact that I had to put the camera near the ceiling to get the right angle. I used a photographic technique called rear flash sync, which fires the flash at the end of a long exposure, freezing the blurred motion at the end of the shot. Deb’s twirl created a great blur in her skirt; Chris’s more conservative dancing style left him perfectly in focus.

Nobody's Fool, CD Tray

We wanted to capture some of the beauty of the Mitguards’ classic instruments, so we propped the guitar and mandolin up on the couch. To add color, we used an old Navajo blanket for a background, the frayed edge of which proved handy in helping hold the guitar in place. To replace the otherwise black background, I added the dark blue sky of the cover, plus an image of the moon I developed for the homepage of this website.

This project has been both challenging and rewarding, and I want to thank Chris and Deb Mitguard for all their support and encouragement.