dustBunny—Halcyon
Album artwork for Toronto musician dustBunny’s (Aster La Fontaine) debut album, Halcyon—released on the summer solstice of 2024.
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Process
Aster is an interesting client: Our collaborations never turn out the way either of us expect, and his ideas always present me with a unique challenge and push me out of my usual comfort zone as an artist. Both of us are heavily opinionated about the creative process and each job usually begins with a long discussion of super abstract concepts and themes we each have on our minds, to get the gears turning. Working with someone with such a rich conceptual vision behind their work is both challenging and rewarding—care is needed to meet in the middle and create something we’re both satisfied with.
This was especially the case with Halcyon’s artwork, which took a cool 7 months to get right. Half of that time I spent experimenting with different image-making techniques, that I had never tried before, because my usual character-focused illustration style quickly revealed itself not to be the right choice.
As we discussed the ideas and themes of Halcyon, one symbol that kept coming up was the Pleiades. Halcyon comes from Alcyone, the brightest star in the Pleiades. Alcyone threw herself in the water after learning about her lover’s death at sea. Halcyon, the concept, is the bittersweetness of remembering better days gone by. Halcyon, the album, is like a bittersweet memoir—dustBunny celebrates and laments his past relationships with that same bittersweetness—equal parts nostalgic, equal parts deranged.
After giving me the initial brief, Aster sent me photos upon photos—photos he felt captured the feeling of Halcyon. I dug through my archives and replied with photos upon photos of my own. Quickly, I began to feel like no illustration I could create could match the feeling contained within these photos—the obvious solution was to incorporate them.
The final result is a digital collage of a ton of different photographs Aster and I took. The glowing orbs in the sky in the shape of the Pleiades were created from carefully layering and manipulating grainy iPhone photos of streetlights in winter. The rest of the artwork is from a photo Aster took, of a swan in a lake shrouded in thick mist. I inverted the colours to turn it a bright icy blue.
Source photographs
Tools
- Clip Studio Paint EX
- Krita
- iPhone 8, iPhone SE 2 (photography)