🎵 IT109: Illustrated Tapes 110: Gurlz are nice 🍓🍊
✏️ Deepti Sharma
🗓 14.05.21

Deepti is an animator/iIllustrator person currently residing in Goa, India.

Hi Deepti. Can you tell us a little bit about your tape and your song selections?

‘Gurlz are nice’ was born in March 2020, when I was drowning in the music of a girl I really liked. It was around the time I ‘came out’ to myself, and I was listening to a lot of queer music, and giggling, and just feeling joyful, even though the rest of the world was going to shit and there was a lockdown which had just been announced. I’ve selected songs which capture how I was feeling when I was discovering how exciting it is to finally admit to myself that I like girls and how pretty they are.

What direction did you take with your cover art, and what was your process?

I just thought about two girls in love, and just lying on the grass together, happy. That is also the feeling I got from some of the songs on the playlist. It’s also the picnic in my head with the girl I really liked. That didn’t go anywhere, but I think I really appreciate how she had mastered the art of making a nice playlist, and this is like, a drawing which would go really well with some of her playlists.

I also love Fuzzybrain (by Dayglow)’s album art. It makes me wish I made that! I actually wanted to go the plasticine direction for this mixtape, but that didn’t really work out.
I love Iron and Wine’s album art for Our Endless Numbered Days. It inspired a film I worked on in my second year of college. This was before I figured out I liked girls, and the film had two girls lying in a field of grass stargazing, and in my denial I was VERY INSISTENT that they were just friends. I feel like the artwork I made is a revamp of that film. I have come a full circle.