Samson Jones Schmetterling

An album called Schmetterling — butterfly — needed a key visual that didn't reach for the obvious illustration, while still carrying the record's darker, rawer register across CD packaging, promo materials and a street campaign.

Turn the artist's own face into the butterfly. A 3D scan of Samson Jones became the base for a painted, skull-white mask splitting outward into wing shapes across the forehead and cheeks — beauty and decay in the same image, mirrored top to bottom wherever the artwork landed.

A full-head photogrammetry scan — studio rig, tracking markers on the walls — gave a clean base mesh; the wing/skull mask was sculpted and lit in CGI on top of it, then composited back onto the scanned photograph rather than left as a pure render. The same key visual then had to hold up mirrored full-bleed on a CD digipak, cropped for a promo sticker, blown up for street posters and squeezed into a square teaser for streaming and social — one asset system built to survive every format it ended up in.

Getting from a scan to a usable, clean mesh is a lot faster now, and a generative pass can rough out mask and material ideas before any of them get built by hand. What still has to be decided by a person is which version actually reads as a butterfly and a skull in the same shape, rather than either alone — that's art direction, not generation.

3D face-scan cleanup, CGI mask sculpt and compositing, and full print production for the CD digipak, promo sticker and street poster, alongside a square teaser cut for streaming and social.