Underlapper – Drinking Dust Artwork

Greg from Underlapper asked me to put together some artwork for their forthcoming single, Drinking Dust. The track will be released as a free download, along with remixes by Cleptoclectics and Vorad Fils very soon, so I needed to turn something around quite quickly.

Fortunately, I had been speaking to Julapy about the delaunay triangulation he used in his/Gentleforce’s app, Horizons, recently. Along with a photo I had been wanting to use from last year’s Sydney Biennale, I had a good start already.

As much as I’ve tried in the past, Jitter really doesn’t lend itself to creating complex shapes (at least by design). So I set off at OpenProcessing, and immediately found an excellent sketch by Kyle Macquarie which creates a delaunay/voronoi mesh around typefaces. Though I spent some time playing with the sketch, it was one of those fortuitous moments that I simply stumbled across something which already did the job perfectly.

The abstraction and swirling colours of my photo were something I wanted to play with, rather than the entire image. The first couple of iterations were based in geometric shapes…

The clean geometry wasn’t really working for me against the mess of lines, so I decided something more textured would be a better approach. Although I was still liking the ‘porthole’ metaphor: looking through the image to see something else behind, it was more a feeling of decay that I was after.

A quick trip to CG Textures later, this was the result…

Though it’s not quite finished, it does capture the tone that I was after: Underlapper’s music is heavily layered and often the vocals are washed in reverb, like a dream or a memory. The colours and textured look of the above version reminds me of images from my youth, whether they be real or remembered.

I must say, after spending a lot of my break working on commercial design, it’s nice to have the freedom of a totally open brief – I’ll post back with final images once I’ve played some more.

Update: Here’s the completed artwork, along with single (and remixes) now available for free download. Get on it.