The Only Thing You Love: Artwork BTS pt.2 (Patreon)

So I wanted to give a little peak into all the photos that went into the final album art...without doxxing myself 😅 I did my best 🫣

*Don't mind me, I forgot to schedule this post*

These are the photos I got of the setup, as well as the photos that I cut apart to paste back together!

I actually started out by walking to my favourite local florist, but they had already de-thorned all the roses 🥺 So as I walked home, I quickly googled florists near me that could do same-day delivery - at this point I was hoping to get all the photos done that day 😅 Because I was doing the emo stream, so I knew I'd be doing my makeup already anyway!

I ended up only having to call one florist, and they thankfully had lots of thorny roses. And not only that! The guy I called also happened to be getting ready to head out for deliveries at the time that I called, so he got them to me in under an hour! A+ service. And I expected it to cost me about $60 minimum for the dozen roses with the delivery, but he only charged me $44 🥹❤️

Thanks to officially the best florist ever, I was able to get to work right away. I started doing my makeup while waiting for the flowers to arrive, and then as soon as they got there, got to work removing leaves and cutting stems to tape up to the windowed wall separating my kitchen and solarium 😅🙈

Fun fact: the first stem I picked up had very few and very small thorns, and I had a brief panic that they were all de-thorned and I started to cry a little and then accidentally stabbed myself with a thorn and realized all was well 😂👍

Also, side note: I'm suddenly really glad I got the apartment that still had these windowed walls, because I don't know what I would have done otherwise 😬 So thank goodness for that! It really was destiny 😎

Anyway, it took a few tries to get all the stems up in a way I liked, while also trying to use minimal tape since it would be a little visible in the photos, but I got there eventually! I had actually set up the stool and the tripod in advance to figure out the right placement for the thorns...because initially, I had wanted to just do the one shoot and have myself in the shot with the thorns from the get go...that did not go well and I ran out of time 😅

Also, I know that I did a terrible job blurring my background, but Canva couldn't support "too many brush strokes" so...we get what we get while still trying to maintain my privacy and safety 🫣

Anyway, it turned out to be for the best that I used separate photos, because due to lighting and tape and my own editing limitations, I needed to cut out specific pieces of the thorns anyway 😅🙈 and that would have been harder if I had been in the shot.

As I mentioned, mom and I walked around in the cold for a while looking for somewhere that would suffice at least for lighting, and then went to my building's gym to see if maybe we could get something usable there. And while the top-down fluorescent lighting was awful and wouldn't allow for a decent shot of me, we did find a workout bench that wasn't being used 🙌 So I had mom take some photos of me for reference, and then some photos of just the bench.

I then had to sift through everything to find photos with approximately the right angles, and then try to remove the logos and stickers from the bench 😅 And then, finally, I had enough to work with for the final art!

Fun fact #2: I used the same roses for my recent promo shoot for the song, so you'll see that later this afternoon on Instagram 👀 They are *very* dead 😂 but I held onto them just in case (and also because I'm lazy), and I'm very glad I did! A secret about the photo that will be up on Instagram in a few hours: I did in fact hit myself in the face with the rose while trying to get that shot 🙈