We thought we were clutching at straws when we decided to ask the Grammy award winning art guys from Demon Hunter, Don and Ryan Clark to send us some exclusive illustrations. But we figured, "Well, what the hell (oops, we mean heck). All they can do is say no." To our surprise, they didn't turn us down. In fact, with no hesitation they sent us six kick-ass drawings that haven't been published anywhere else.
We'd like to think we're jaded enough not to get too impressed by anything, but we were genuinely humbled that the dudes who do all of the killer album art for Tooth & Nail and Solid State Records and have designed covers for Foo Fighters, Chris Cornell and Will I Am, were totally into contributing stuff to our metal blog. Kinda makes us reconsider doing so many stories on really evil bands like Deicide and Gorgoroth -- at least for, like, two seconds.
Click "more" to read what singer Ryan Clark has to say about the six original illustrations, then check them out for yourself:
Many of you may already know this, but when Don and I are not touring or recording with Demon Hunter, we're designing. We have a studio in Seattle called Invisible Creature and we specialize in print design, mostly for the music industry. You know... CD packages, posters, t-shirts, advertisements... anything and everything in that world. We love what we do and much of the time, we're allowed to do what we love.
But that all depends.
It depends on the band, the concept, the music, the people involved. There are a lot of factors. Every so often we're given complete freedom to do whatever we want- and we jump at that chance. Those are the cases in which we feel like we really have a chance to shine. I would say some examples of this would be Norma Jean's "O' God, The Aftermath," Bleeding Through's "The Truth," "The Chariot's "The Fiancée" and Project 86's "Rival Factions." These CD packages are definitely among our personal favorites, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that we were given a lot of room to be as creative as we wanted to be.
Some bands have a very specific vision for their record, and that's fine. But in a lot of cases, the intensely-band-(or label, or management)-directed concepts can be less effective or not communicate as well as we would hope. And again, that all depends. Sometimes we get some great outside direction.
We've done hundreds of CD packages. We've done many covers that were never used, many denied t-shirts, many projects that we lost interest in, maybe took our credit out of, etc. It happens.
The guys in He Is Legend are good friends, and I love their music and when it came time to start designing for their most recent album "Suck Out The Poison," we had agreed on a direction and I ran with it. To make a long story short, the concept changed and the artwork I created was never used. I would say it's some of my favorite unused artwork. Each piece is based on a song from the album, and they're all illustrated by hand. Check them out...
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