HIGHLY ADDICTIVE ALBUM COVER DESIGN

Highly Addictive was the first album released by Pop Machine and established the label’s playful, Pop Art-influenced visual language. The idea plays with excess and over-consumption, satirising a dark subject through the seductive language of confectionery and consumer packaging.

I wanted the image to feel immediately accessible before its darker meaning became apparent. Chocolate, sprinkles and the bright cyan background give it the visual appeal of a confectionery product, while the skull turns that attraction into something more uncomfortable. The contradiction between desire and consequence became the central idea for the cover.

For visual research, I looked at artists who had transformed familiar objects, food and symbols of mortality through Pop Art and sculpture. Damien Hirst’s diamond skull connected mortality with luxury, spectacle and excess; Claes Oldenburg’s monumental everyday objects showed how changes of material and scale could make something familiar feel strange; Wayne Thiebaud’s paintings of cakes and confectionery brought colour, indulgence and the visual appeal of food into the reference language; while Andy Warhol’s skull imagery demonstrated how a traditionally dark subject could become graphic and immediate.

I sculpted the skull and chocolate forms digitally. Working in 3D gave me complete control over the silhouette, surface and material, allowing the object to be pushed away from photorealism towards something deliberately glossy, synthetic and closer to a contemporary Pop Art object.

The sculpture was then treated much like a physical product shoot. I built a virtual photographic environment around it, using a cyclorama, softboxes and studio lighting to control reflections across the chocolate surface and give the object a convincing physical presence. The aim was to make an impossible object feel as though it had genuinely been photographed.

Highly Addictive was the first cover I created for Pop Machine and became the starting point for an ongoing collaboration with the label.