Pot Plant House Party - Sorry I Didn’t Call You Back (EP, 2020, Pipers Son)

Rounding out the trio of cover designs, the final full EP design was intended to take the previous two and turn the energy up to 11, with a vibrant colour scheme and kinetic design to clearly distinguish it from the singles that came before it. This was actually decided upon early in the piece, and the previous two were made with this final design in mind. There was a fourth design held aside which would have had a minty green and pink colour scheme in case there was need for it, but maybe that will pop up in the future.

Like the singles, the concepts and execution style were born out of the lockdown period in April 2020, and we needed something that was doable at home with limited prop resources, and with no model/talent to consider for safety reasons. This final image was really intended to capture some of the frustration of being stuck at home with increasingly old school methods of keeping entertained. While these themes don’t necessarily present themselves in the lyrics, it felt like a subtle way to acknowledge the year we’ve had as a shared experience, through the production and release of it all.

The main image is about 90% a single image, with some elements composited from alternate takes and some repositioned slightly for graphical balance. The ‘takes’ were me throwing handfuls of Scrabble and chess pieces at the extremely precariously balanced setup, destroying it, and resetting it, for about 3 hours until I had what I needed to work with. The rear cover is genuinely the final resting place of everything in the main image once it all fell over.

The graphics were all made up to reference the 50/50 cream and black patterning of the chess board, whether it was a horizonal or vertical split. The rear of the lyric insert sheet was composited of film photos shot during the recording process at Hopping Mouse but aligned to the same 8x8 grid of the chessboard, utilizing various sizes to disguise the reference but keep it feeling congruous.

We also made the promotional images using the exact red fabric from the artwork to give them something to tie all the marketing together with over the release period.

Shot on Nikon D850 with Godox studio lights, main edit in Lightroom, compositing and design work in Photoshop.