the Mr. Henry blog-o-sphere

Our love goes out to Selah Sue, the wonderful voice of Leuven! We did concept,  photography, design, … on her first EP. She wanted a “kinda dark” feeling surrounding it. Buy it now you lovely people, also check her temporary one-pager! One Love, bombaklah! ( a myspace for now, a website for her next christmas )

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 backside to create some contrast… Initially, the inside 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-what-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: let’s go 3D!

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!