Recently, the Calgary-based singer, songwriter, and producer, Troy Kokol, commissioned me to revisit something we worked on a few years ago. For his album Lonely Ghost, I did the art and type for his release. This time around, for the track "Lead Balloon", I wanted to be able to give life to the illustration. So I drew it in pieces so that it could be animated. This is just a small portion of the song, but it was fun to realise what I had initially envisioned.

Lead Balloon was a song from the initial album that Troy rerecorded recently. The song was a "throwaway acoustic track," but Troy gave it a new life.

The full artwork for the Lonely Ghost album.

The CD cover for Lonely Ghost.

The images for the project were drawn by hand and watercolored. Each piece was planned to be a layer that would move. We wanted to retain the same look and feel of the Lonely Ghost album.
 

The final artwork was delivered to Troy. It was way bigger of a scene than I'm sure he was expecting. The crop for the track was fairly tight on the character and balloon. I was thinking of animation from the start.

Here is now the song cover looks in Apple Music.

Troy was able to load a portion of the animation to his Spotify track as a Clip.

 

To support social media marketing, I created a gif of the character and loaded him on my GIPHY. Using Troy's name and "#leadballoon," it is able to be a sticker for Instagram stories.

This is the horizontal format for the short clip I animated. To see the vertical format, head over to Instagram or view on YouTube. It captures the idea of the city going to the forest better than the standard view.

Troy is working on a full-length animation, so be sure to check out his Instagram for updates.