Twilight Hour

This past spring, my friend, Halifax-based pianist Jennifer King, embarked on a pandemic recording project of piano music evocative of the magic hour of fairytales and storytelling. She was inspired by her grandparents who, during her childhood practise sessions, would sit nearby listening and conjuring up tales to accompany the music she was playing. Jennifer asked if I’d be interested in working on some illustrations, and to do the design for the CD package. Of course I said yes.

The recording, Twilight Hour: Collected Stories for Piano, was released on October 30, just in time for Halloween, and included the launch of an accompanying video project Jennifer worked on with multi-media artist, Katrina Westin, who used stop-motion animation to illustrate some of the pieces. The resulting videos and Jennifer’s recording are at once playful, nostalgic, beautiful and reflective, which makes for a lovely contribution to artistic output in the time of COVID.

In our discission about the illustrations, Jennifer expressed a wish for a hand-drawn (and Edward Gorey-esque) feel for the CD artwork. She envisioned a piano turning into a storybook. I had been playing around with watercolours throughout the year, and enjoying the effect of ink drawn vignettes over splashes of colour, so decided to go in that direction.

In order to maintain the hand-drawn effect on a digital file, I photographed the watercolour dabs (painted on cold press paper) and imported them to Photoshop for minor edits and cleaning up, and then imported them to use as background layers in Indesign. The ink drawings were initially drawn on paper, then uploaded to Photoshop for colour editing, and Illustrator to create final composite images. It was a really, really fun project to work on that stretched both my technical and creative skills.

Twilight Hour: Collected Stories for Piano is available in hard copy or streaming through Bandcamp. The videos can be streamed via YouTube here.