Very early on in my process, I had the idea to incorporate a physical collage that I had created a few years earlier into the design. Serendipitously, the collage was entirely aerial-themed, so it appeared as a perfect fit.

Instead of taking the collage as-is and stamping the album name on it somewhere, I wanted the album cover to stand as an entirely new piece of art. What resulted was essentially a collage of a collage.

As was the process of making the original collage, this new collage was an exercise in using only the materials at hand and combining them to create a new balance of elements. Unlike most other, if not all collages I’d created previously, I utilized a repetition of elements to create this balance.

The plane wing in the original collage, spanning the entire length of the piece and acting almost as its spine, was repeated across the new collage, again acting almost as the spine which the other elements were added around. Repetition was of course also utilized with text, for which, along with the added cardinal wing and poppy flower, I chose a vibrant red hue to provide a nice contrast to the blue tones.

Not unlike all other collages I’d created previously, this process involved a healthy amount of trial and error and, again, of course, a bit of serendipity.