Black Part Love, the howto

Mr. Henry loves to share, so what follows is how we made this cover, from the ground up! ( after the proposal getting approved of course, out of 3 proposals...

Step 1: Photography

We did all the photography, knowing we wanted to build 3D letters on a wall, and used a dark background to create some contrast... Initially, the inner sleeve was also going to be a mix between photo and 3D, but ended up as a 3D render because of the tight timeframe.

All pictures were taken in Brussels, Beursschouwburg (on that one day in Belgium when ALL public transport was down, and the centre of Brussels was filled with people on strike. Hello 3-hour drive-which-was-supposed-to-be-25-minutes).

Step 2: building the letters

We've built the entire letter composition in illustrator. Each "cube" of text is a separate file. We then composed a parent file, that had all the "cubes", and we drew a box around each cube, making it look like every word is placed inside a box.

The entire box needed to be a compound shape, because when we want to extrude everything (that’s a 3D term yeah yeah), you can't have seperate objects, it looks like crap. So compound that shape, and make sure nothing overlaps!! (cfr. image 4). Pretty tiring process, a lot of trial and error...

Step 3:D

When the letters are finished, we need to make everything "real"... Basically, one needs to find the perfect lighting and environment settings. And then it’s just pressing a button. But of course, we had some problems on the way. For one, the overlapping (as you can see in the outline-view above) is a scary sight! We then aligned the scene with the perspective in our final picture.

Step 4: comp everything together!

The final result! Throw everything into photoshop, and paint away… Sold exclusively on her concerts, not in stores ( too bad for all the fans! ) And oh yeah, here’s her myspace!