this was originally published on june 30, 2025 as a video on my youtube channel. see video below.
i just released my debut single, Monica, which means that i had to create cover art for it.
when i went to work on my album cover art, right off the bat, my mind went to the iconic covers. you know, the ones we all know. it really felt like it should be something special.
during the whole process of producing this single, i had the cover art in the back of my mind and i was thinking about it again and again.
first, i thought that maybe it could be an artsy hand-drawn cover because, after all, i did used to draw and paint and do lots of art stuff, i guess. but it’s been a long time since i’ve been drawing anything, so i was not very confident that i could pull something off that would be both pretty and meaningful, and also be done in the time that i had to do it.
then, i thought maybe i could hire somebody on fiverr to design the album cover for me. but i’ve had experience in my day job hiring people for graphic arts, and of course, some of them do great jobs, but it’s never exactly what i want. i have a very precise idea of what i want and it’s not very easy to convey into words something that you have as a picture in your mind.
or at least it’s not easy for me. so i’ve never been really ecstatic about the results.
then i thought maybe i could use ai to do it because i keep hearing how ai is getting better and better at image generation. and i mean, these tools are pretty impressive, but in the end it was just not working out. not to mention, again, translating a vision that you have in your head into words so that a tool can put it back into a vision… it’s really hard.
i ended up finding images that kind of looked like what i wanted, feeding them to an ai so that it would generate a prompt that i could then feed back to an image-generating ai. it was like a bad game of graphic telephone. it didn’t look anything like what i wanted in the end. and i probably used enough energy to power the state of ghana for like three months. so, to say i was disappointed would be an understatement.)-
but i kept looking and i kept thinking about it.
i took my time because i was looking for a great idea, and great ideas, well, they don’t just come out of nowhere. they need time to develop. they don’t just show up.
and then came the time to release my single and i still had nothing.
so, i wondered maybe i was putting a little too much pressure on myself. i looked up the definition of iconic and it says “widely recognized and well-established, widely known and acknowledged, especially for distinctive excellence.”
well, that pretty much meant that i couldn’t decide by myself that something that i made was going to become iconic !
(not in the least because i was not widely recognized, what with my 13 youtube followers!)
what i could do was, as always, do my best and hope for the best.
so, i decided to go back to my goals. (that’s what i do generally when i’m lost.) and my goal was actually to just release my debut single. it’s been several years at this point that i wanted to do this. so, the goal was just to put it out there.
and i had a deadline. yes, it was a self-imposed one, but still, i was committed.
so, i told myself: done is better than perfect.
start before you’re ready.
progress, not perfection.
you know, all the cheesy motivation poster fluff that i’d cover my walls with if it wasn’t so tacky.
if the perfect cover had to be iconic and symbolic and timeless and instantly recognizable, what was the “perfectly fine” cover supposed to look like? i started looking for the minimum requirements that would make it a good enough cover that would allow me to achieve my goals.
i wanted it to match the emotion of the song.
i wanted something striking or, at least, intriguing that would catch somebody’s eye.
and i wanted something that felt like me.
oh, and it couldn’t cost me any money because i’d blown my whole budget on producing the song itself.
so, i ended up thinking about what the song itself was about: eating disorders and body dysmorphia and food addiction and sugar addiction. i wanted something to do with mirrors because there was this idea of looking at yourself in the mirror and not liking what you see. and i also wanted something to do with addiction. i found a photo on pinterest and i was like, “i like this idea of her being reflected in the mirror.” then i thought i could add the addiction part by making lines with sugar like you’d make lines with cocaine.
and so i had my idea.
i figured i’d shoot it myself with my trusty dslr camera. i put a mirror down on my dining room table and i asked my daughter to come and press the button.
during the process i actually spent a lot of time wiping down that mirror because man… so many smudges. but it actually didn’t take very long.
we did take a lot of photos (i think i took like 200 plus photos) but i figured if i took a lot of them, there was bound to be one at least that was good enough.
and there was.
i took this one and i flipped it over because i liked the way my face looked better in the mirror portion. i did want this cover to have a vintage kind of look, kind of ‘80s, so the makeup helped already. and also, i figured i’d add a ton of grain on there just so that it would give that vintage feel. also, i didn’t want to edit any lines or wrinkles out, and the grain took care of that and smoothed the whole thing.
i added some text and that was it. i was done.
at one point, i did wonder whether i should put a label on that sugar jar just to make sure that people understood that it was sugar, but then i thought it would take away from the clean look of the photo. and i figured, who has that much cocaine in their house and keeps it in a jar? (people don’t do that, do they?)
i figured people would realize that it was sugar.
hopefully.