Muhammad Mustafa has quietly become one of those names whose illustrations have started to become part of how we remember the music itself. His covers for Cairokee’s ‘Roma’, Marwan Pablo’s ‘CTRL’, Tul8te’s ‘Narein’ and, most recently, ‘Supernova’ have made him one of the go-to visual artists in Egypt’s music scene, even though becoming an album artist was never really the plan.
“My most influential form of art is music. It evokes images in my mind, and turning those feelings into a visual image is an incredibly satisfying process for me,” Muhammad Mustafa tells Wara El Mazzika.
“The emotion and concept behind the lyrics start taking shape visually in my mind. I sketch whatever comes naturally, then develop the idea that speaks to me most until it reaches its final form.”
Mustafa studied painting before spending years as a sketch artist and draftsman in advertising, working across Egypt, the UAE and Bahrain. That background still shows in the way he builds his images, but there’s something much looser happening underneath. In a scene where album artwork can sometimes feel like an afterthought, Mustafa is quietly doing the opposite: he listens to the music repeatedly and lets the sound shape whatever world comes next.
