Behind The Artworks: Better Than The Book - Hopes And Dreams (2019)

The cover artwork for the album is a watercolor painting I did base on a beautiful photo my Uncle Mark took of the West Pier in Brighton with some extra additions, references, and imagery from the album’s lyrics added in for good measure!

The setting is Brighton’s stony seafront and in the background you can make out the burnt out West Pier as mentioned in “Brighton” as well as an off-shore wind farm on the horizon. The main foreground imagery comes from the album’s lead single “Meteor Shower” with the batter swinging at a dark oncoming meteor with the digitally added BTTB logo on it (I tried to paint it originally, but couldn’t make it clear enough). You can make out many smaller/distant meteors in the background sky too. The bat has the album title painted on it, and the black strangely geometric meteor is meant to be a reference to the Atari game Asteroids, to coincide with “GG”. Other references that can be seen are the red and white flags from “Artificial Ignorance” stuck in the fish and chips mentioned in “Brighton”, the batter wearing a suit and tie as mentioned in “And I Fear”, and the long hair referenced in “Get A Haircut”. The paper cranes by the fish and chips are a reference to both the seagulls in Brighton as well as the thousand paper cranes mentioned in “Hopes and Dreams” which have been featured various lyrics and album artwork since the “One Small Step” EP.