When I first met David Berkeley he wanted to work together to produce illustrations of characters for a book he was writing where all the different narratives would connect in one way or another. He eventually wrote songs that related to each of these characters and turned that into an album that would be released alongside the book - each piece had to function on it's own, but also have visual connections to one another. The content was related, but each had to be able to be experienced on it's own. To see how I developed the album packaging for this project HEAD OVER HERE.

One of the things I noticed in the stories that make up The Free Brontosaurus is that all of the characters seemed to be collectors, and the things they collected had significance within the various stories. Some objects were clear metaphors while other characters seemed to just be obsessives that would horde anything, but there was a sense of both physical accumulation and an emotional accumulation of personal histories and narratives that carry through the work. Due to these themes I started working on making lots of drawings of objects and ephemera that seemed to permeate the various stories in Berkeley's book.

I drew each object separately on the page with a loose plan for how I could create a single composition out of them later on once I'd had enough stuff to work with. 

I started making small groupings of objects that I used as building blocks for a larger composition. These small groupings helped me see how different pieces of the final composition could work together.

Eventually I began piecing these small groupings together to form the final cover composition. To tie the work in with it's audio counterpart I decided that I'd use a similar color palette and painting technique to add color to the book cover. I worked with a combination of digital coloring using various custom Photoshop paintbrushes, alongside scans of color I had created using traditional media to ensure authentic textures that meshed well with the overall feel of the materials David and I were creating.