Blues: Heavy Sci-Fi

As I'm sitting here writing this, I've suddenly started remembering all of the events that have occurred in the course of this project. It is epic. I painted the Space Corpse piece intending for it to be the cover, but the band was not so into it, they wanted something more epic, but just then there was some debate about whether I would be doing this cover at all. They were talking with Ferret Records about putting the album out, and they have an in-house illustrator who does their covers, so they weren't sure if the label would help to pay me. Then there was a huge fiasco with the Poison the Well (PTW) tour poster. PTW is signed with Ferret, and Blues saw my post and asked The Label owner about it and.....it was a rough couple days I don't really want to get into, but it was nasty. The guy from Ferret was nice though, and PTW had nothing to do with it, but their manager was considerate too. Anyway, then Blues decided that Ferret was not a good fit for them, and I was back on the job. The final Heavy Sci-Fi painting is by far the longest I've ever spent on a piece. It looks good, the band and 1912 records (who is releasing it) is pleased, but man am I glad it's finished. Painting geometric shapes was much more taxing than I imagined it would be. They had to be so precise, and even though I gave myself some room for it to look hand drawn, it was still taxing. I've been going to a lot more Gallery shows in the city lately, and I think the level of finish I've been seeing is what inspired me to spend so long on this painting.

Heavy Sci-Fi is an elaborate concept album, which in some ways made my job easy, because there was a long and elaborate story behind the lyrics, but it also made my some difficult, because not all of the story was clear from the lyrics. We worked it out relatively painlessly, but it was almost like doing illustrations for Lord of the Rings based solely on the overview printed on the back of the book.

Blues CD - "Snakepit"

For this projected I opted to do some art, but not the whole layout. It ended up being a good decision. All these CD covers ended up being due at the same time, and things have been very hectic for me. I don't know how the final layout will look, but they seem capable of handling it. This was one of those projects that makes you question your artistic capability. They just wanted me to do whatever, and they told me the name of the album was snakepit. You can see from the sketches that I went straight for snakes, the literal interpretation. I did the sketch of the guy with no face, and belly snakes first. I kept the no-face thing the whole way through, I do that a lot. Someone said I do that because I have identity issues. I liked it and sent it to them. They seemed to like it and a made a very complete painting of it in my sketchbook that would have been the cover, except that it wasn't working. So I went on to another idea of a snake coiled up in a woman's stomach as if it was her intestines, swallowing her heart. This idea was not very good, and I just couldn't make it work, so on I went. This is when things started getting REALLY bad. I started doing giant fantasy snakes and heart shaped balloons. I even sent them a sketch and they said they didn't think it was right for them. I think that's a vast understatement, but I'm glad they said it in a nice way. This band is fucking hardcore metal, that image doesn't suite them at all. Now that I'm looking at those again, I'm actually embarrassed of showing them. Them there's a stupid drawing of a little girl, sigh..... Also some fossils, I had some weird idea on a plane, don't ask. Playing with some new sharpies there.

After doing the heart drawings I was thing hard about my future as a creative being, and how it may not exist. Jeremy from Blues said something about how it didn't have to be so literal, and I was like, that's good, 'cause I can't make it work and all this shit sucks. After just being frustrated with my successive failures, I just said "You know what, I'm just going to do some creepy paintings and send them to you." They needed the art really soon because I had taken too long trying to make something awesome for them. I didn't do sketches, I just found some pictures of faith healers and made them into these paintings. It seems like Jeremy was really happy with these, it was exactly what he wanted to see from me. I liked the boards so much that I used them in my web-page design. You might be able to tell from the forth panel that I had run out of time, and I couldn't do another painting, so I did that drawing and added some photoshop stuff. I also had a problem getting this one done last week because I just started a new full-time job, and I was too tired when I got home to draw. I'm ok now though, I had to get used to the new schedule.