music to my eyes
Hello everybody! Thank you for checking out my July 2026 blog post! I have a lot to get into! As the title suggests I have a lot of music related endeavors going on, but I also have a nature photography recap to talk about, and some illustrations, that as I am writing this, I am not sure if I will show them or not!
First and foremost, the city of Burlington, Iowa is hosting a jazz festival in November of this year. Specifically the 13th and 14th which is very exciting! It is across three locations, and has a variety of artists that will be performing. The most exciting part for me however is that I will be designing the visual language for the entire production!
Now this started with a Facebook event cover photo, which I will leave below. It is defiantly going to translate into an 11 × 17 poster that will be hung all over town. It is potentially going to be a 27 × 40 movie poster, and if I have my way, a simple line of merchandise would be very fun!
If you’re a jazz fan you will quickly recognize that the entire campaign is designed after the Blue Note cover of Cannonball Adderley’s album “Somethin’ Else”. If you aren’t a jazz fan, I hope you’ll enjoy a clean and digestible design campaign that is essentially a celebration of Franklin Gothic Condensed. I would highly recommend the album, and I hope you stay tuned to see the entire campaign come to fruition. It will be posted all over town, and eventually on my instagram (@cooper.judah.art).
The second music related thing I want to talk about is another single cover design! It is my first cover in the pop music world, and I hope it gets a good reaction out of the audience. It is super inspired by pop punk music of the 2000s. I hope the cover is attention grabbing, but becomes a visual representation of the story once you listen to the song.
Now while I will tell you that the song is going to come from Nashville singer Joey Falcone, I will withhold any more information about it until its release late summer/early fall. I can however leave you with a little visual teaser down below!
Next thing to talk about is photography! Photography is where I started my creative journey when I was really young. Getting my first camera in elementary school. Between that and doodling in my notebooks, those are the earliest artistic moments I can remember.
Eventually pursuing photography fell to the side, not absent but not a priority. Developing skills in graphic design, illustration and animation were (and still are for the most part) much more of a priority.
But I needed a project this summer, and I have always thought to myself that if I were to pursue photography as a full time gig, that I would want to be a nature photographer. So, I have been working on a series all summer. I don’t want to reveal any details quite yet about locations or the inspiration, but at the end of September I plan on posting this series throughout my online accounts and attempting to get at least some of them into galleries late this year.
Below is my favorite photo I have taken thus far. The posting of this blog post marks about the halfway point of the summer season, I am excited to see what comes next!
Lastly, while I mentioned some illustrations coming soon I don’t think it is quite time to share them yet. Instead, I want to talk about the project as a whole. If you have been reading my blog posts over the last year or following me on my socials at all you have heard about “The 9th TCG”. A fantasy based card game I am illustrating!
We have a big team, theory crafters, play testers, illustrators, copy editors, and designers. This month we have finalized the logo! I got to work on this with an artist by the name of Grayson Varn. Any excuse I can come up with to work with him I do, he helped to add to the visual storytelling of the final logo. Which makes it so that we can have a website published now! A landing page at least - www.the9thtcg.com - more to come on this! I will leave the logo below! Again, huge shoutout to Grayson. We will at some point be introducing the entire team via our socials @the9thtcg
This was a loaded blog post! I hope it was a fun read! God bless, and as always - thank you for hanging out!
- Judah Cooper
