In the past year I’ve been working on my 5th album. It’s not finished yet but I made an cover artwork in advance, so it’ll be ready when I can release the album. It was entirely made out of thick grained coloured paper cut to simple shapes, and pasted together in a collage; i used tracing paper for the hourglass shape, and regular office paper for the clock dial. It looks a bit empty on the top, because that’s where the album title and artist name will go — yes, i made physical lettering and glued it on physical layers! one for the French version, and one in English. Those two will be revealed upon release.

This thing required a lot of planning and some outside-the-box thinking. Many elements had to be perfectly flush but also perfectly aligned, the measurements and cuts needed to be very precise for the result to look nice and symmetrical. Scanning it also turned out not trivial, since it’s 24×24 cm, which is too big for my scanner window; fortunately it has a feature that allows to scan an image by parts, and the system detects overlaps and stitches everything back together seamlessly on its own.

To fit the story of the album, the cover represents a team of abstracted avians, joining beaks towards a common goal across time. A few long beaked friends of mine showed interest in being featured, but since I had more candidates than slots, I had to make hard choices: I made one model of each, then evaluated which of them looked best together. I wanted to make the colours as varied as possible, but as balanced as can be, while keeping everyone easily recognisable. The beaks who made it to the final cut are, counterclockwise from the top left: Ferris, Rani, Ollie, myself, Akiara Chiba, Jack Gloster, and Ferrant Morteau. It’s been ages since I last made proper traditional art, and I must say it’s a pretty pleasing item to handle.