My album cover designs come through process rather than as an image in my mind. Resizing an image and choosing text can bring an impression of it looking right and that rightness can be developed, such as a photograph rotated slightly, or a bit of play with the brightness level.
Professional design strikes me as having qualities I personally cannot produce. Artists with high quality materials, musicians with instruments costing as much as a car, the video artist with equipment and computers costing many thousands of pounds, the sculptor working with bronze, is all very elitist. Society is arranged with limited resources being exchanged and so the artist who works with high value materials and equipment has more market value.
High grade materials are only a choice if they can be afforded. Ironically I am privileged by having time to explore music to my hearts content and that is a choice, so perhaps it is really about choice more than economics.
Creativity is a natural human trait, I have discovered music comes out of playing like a child, it gets better when informed by higher level knowledge, but it has to be playful to be musical. The arts including music, are defined by high quality materials and high levels of knowledge, but the human quality of playfulness and the unlimited materials of the stuff of life are where art is at. Andy Goldsworthy certainly knows this, even if he is certainly privileged to be able to travel to the Bay of Fundy to build a stick work.
If anything this view has pointed out the value of choice as more significant than having large amounts of money to buy materials and equipment for an artist. I could build a stick work today on the River Deben.
Something essentially human is expressed in the use of found materials and the choice of place as a creative act.
This is the Andy Goldsworthy video I was moved by:
Techno live from a suitcase of analogue synths.