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Recently I was hired to illustrate and design some cd packaging and a tour poster for Great Gods of Greed upcoming debut album. They are a Heavy Metal band in the tradition of Metallica, Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath and feature Mike Clark from Suicidal Tendencies on guitar.
The themes the band plays with revolve mostly around greed and exploitation. Their message is right on point with much of the general unrest most people are feeling today so there were a lot of timely concepts to play with.
It was important for the band to stick to the traditional metal ethos and as a result they wanted to create a recognizable mascot character. Much the same way Derek Riggs did for Iron Maiden with Eddie the Head. The band came up with a character they call Greedy and his main feature is his skull head with features that kind if spell out the band’s name. Two capital “G’s” for the eye sockets, a dollar sign for the nose cavity and teeth spelling out the word “greed”.
I did numerous sketches of the skull an Greedy in various situations as well as played around with the symbolism associated with wealth and corporations. The final result for the cover was a wrap around that features Greedy in his corporate headquarters basking in his wealth while brokers plummet past his window a la stock market crash in 29. It’s a brutal and unsettling image that serves as a commentary on the current state of wealth and the economy…it also helps that the music is pretty darn good too.
An illustrated logo design for the soon to be released band The Great Gods of Greed. The original concept is by my old friend and bass player for the band Edward Jucius.
It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of album cover art. It’s safe to say that it’s probably the single most influential image source I encountered as a child. That’s why I put together this post for my friend and Creative Director Extraordinaire Irene Gallo over at Tor Books for their website. I gave her well over 50 different album covers so Irene decided to break it up into 4 parts. Here is the first installment.
More drawings with friends….and then some. Two techniques for drawing revolving around music. The larger one is a pencil drawing of Elvis Costello from a performance at the Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, MD. I was lucky to be close enough to actually make a couple sketches on the scene.
The rest are ball point pen (red, blue and black) on oaktag, the same stuff they use for office folders. I added a little White Out to bump up some shapes. I wanted to see what I could make with materials just about everyone has laying around. I’m also a fan of those old school red conté crayon figure studies. Yup, that’s Casey with his banjo again. And Anthony with the bass.
