The only reason why this cover set for The Virgin Suicides by French electronic band AIR — short for “Amour, Imagination, Rêve” (love, imagination, dream) — was even remotely possible, is the recently released reissue titled The Virgin Suicides Redux. This new edition has not only been newly (re)mixed and sounds notably different from the original album (which is why in this instance I’ve kept both versions in my digital music library), but it also brings along an unexpectedly high-res, 4000 pixel wide update of the original artwork designed by Mike Mills. And it is because of this album art that you are now being offered a custom covers collection for one of the defining young adult films of modern cinema, Sofia Coppola’s eternal The Virgin Suicides.
I don’t want to bore you with lengthy details, but all except one of the covers in the gallery above stem directly from the new Redux artwork. The huge dimensions allowed me to crop into the image without any loss of quality. I was able to cut out individual elements, clone and stamp things, rearrange or re-colour at will, everything at pixel-level… – you name it. Tedious work, but thanks to the large format, the results were pretty satisfying. Whether it’s the matching light/dark couple of the official cover (#1, #2) or the single covers for “Playground Love” (#5, #6), on which I had to completely take apart the Redux artwork and re-assemble it, almost like a puzzle.
And here’s a fun little detail you might not have noticed: the leaves scattered across the cover? They’re not as varied as they seem. In fact, they’re just two or three distinct shapes, cleverly reused and repositioned to create the illusion of natural randomness. Once you spot it, you can’t unsee it.
Speaking of leaves and obsessive reconstruction, I also took on the challenge of digitally recreating the Mike Mills poster from the 15th Anniversary Edition (#3), along with that lovely foil-printed back cover it came in (#4). That particular endeavor was a whole different beast. The only source I had was a low-quality, poorly lit photo I stumbled upon on Discogs — hardly ideal. So I turned to my AI toolkit. First, I used upscaling to blow up the image to nearly 6000 pixels, just to get a workable base. Then came the manual labor: I traced every black line by hand, painstakingly redrawing the contours and edges, and recoloured each individual leaf manually. It was a maddeningly slow process, and at times I questioned my own sanity. But I was determined, because I wanted this particular cover so badly that I was willing to go down the winding road, including a fair bit of cursing.
During those long, meditative Photoshop sessions, I often find myself immersed in the very soundtrack I’m designing covers for. It’s become a kind of ritual, a sonic companion to the visual process. And during this particular stretch, according to the ever-watchful eye of Last.fm, I’ve listened to AIR’s The Virgin Suicides soundtrack eleven times, start to finish. Eleven full spins. And the wildest part? I’m still not remotely tired of it! If anything, I’ve grown even more enamored. It’s that good! It’s the perfect auditory backdrop for a lazy Sunday afternoon, when the light filters in through half-closed blinds and time seems to slow down to a molasses-like dormant crawl. They somehow managed to distill that sensation into hand-crafted, analogue soundscapes featuring period equipment like Moogs, Rhodes piano or vocoders. It’s hypnotic, melancholic, and strangely comforting. And this was only the band’s second album, mind you! A sophomore release that feels like a masterstroke.
Already perfectly accompanied by a score like this, but not enough, Sofia Coppola’s debut feature also came with its own songs compilation. A curated selection of tracks that, much like the film itself, are steeped in the sepia-toned nostalgia of the 1970s. Naturally, this project needed a few custom covers for this compilation as well, it felt like a necessary extension.
Thankfully, I already had a small collection of custom covers that I had made almost twenty years ago (#12 to #14). Most of them were based on fan posters that I had come across back then, and now it was time to adapt them to the viewing habits of modern eyes. After some digging, I managed to find the same posters I used back then, albeit in frustratingly low resolution and, sadly, without any source information. Then came a curious twist: I discovered something I had completely forgotten about. It turns out that I myself had uploaded them to CineMaterial back in 2006. That revelation was both amusing and mildly exasperating. On one hand, it wasn’t particularly helpful in my attempt to track down the original artists. On the other hand, I had to give my past self a quiet nod of appreciation, because if I hadn’t taken the initiative to archive these posters for the general public back then, I wouldn’t have had any chance to re-download them now.
HQCovers 