I decided to take a small break from custom work and wanted to do a personal art piece for fun recently. Being bombarded with goregrind requests and the usual blood-drenched horror scenes, its a fresh escape to
let my mind wonder into a more trippy and surreal environment. This piece is entitled "Confined Determination' and depicts a skeletal goat creature confined in an astral temple hovering over the earth. The vibe was meant to show the brooding desire within the creature to manifest the demolishing of worlds in the background. The entangled girls, black heart roses and bloodied dagger symbolize the sacrifice of love or compassion. The duality of the mind with the two headed fetus as his crown, and even within a confined imprisonment his passion boils and manifests destruction. This piece was not commissioned by any band and is open and available for purchase. Email mike@visualdarkness.com for more info.

It's been a minute since we've heard from our favorite demented artist, Mike Hrubovcak, vocalist for Monstrosity and Vile and owner of bad-ass design company Visual Darkness. So, to reacquaint you all with the master of the macabre (assuming that label's not already taken by someone like George Romero), here's a long-overdue Nightmare Visions entry from Hrubovcak. Click more if you want to risk a long, sleepless night.

I did this for the band Tenderizer from Mexico City. They needed a new design for some hoodies and T-shirts they were making for an upcoming show or tour they had going on with Deicide. They left the idea open to me, so I ran with a fire/demon skull idea, which is very simple, upfront and in your face. I like the tribal aspect behind the skull as well, and it's kind of symmetrical, too so it'll look cool on zip-up hoodies, etc.

Before we head off into the blustery night to take in Slipknot, Coheed and Cambria and Trivium at Madison Square Garden, we thought we'd leave you with a new nightmarish image from Mike Hrubovcak, vocalist for Monstrosity and Vile and macabre artist extraordinaire. Indeed, we are pround to present his first DVD cover art for the upcoming Wildeye film "Gothkill."

Click "more" to see the illustration and read Hrubovcak's commentary.

This latest project was quite refreshing. I always wanted to break into horror movie packaging and I happened to stumble upon this interesting company called WildEye that put out some really crazy off the wall kinda films like "The Bloody Ape" and "Blitzkrieg - Escape From Stalag 69." Doing zombie or horror flicks would be ideal for me, but I'm also a big fan of a lot of cheesy "B" movies and a
lot of the stuff that Troma puts out like "The Toxic Avenger," "Cannibal! The Musical" and Igor and the Lunatics."

WildEye gave me the opportunity to work on their newest release "Gothkill," which involves burning witches at the stake and making deals with the devil to slaughter goth kids at a New York goth/ vampire club. The movie features vast array of New York City fetish dancers, fire performer Flambeaux
and a special appearance from Mistress Juliya.

It may not be zombies, but its got plenty of fire, violence, satanism, nudity and the killing of goth kids, which isn't really a far stretch away from the death metal environments I normally work in. Since this could very well end up on the shelves at Best Buy, I had to tone down the gore somewhat and keep the brutality tasteful for distribution reasons.

So, for the final "Nightmare Visions" column of 2008, Hrubovcak and HeadbangersBlog.com proudly present the new cover art for Chainsaw Dissection's Eviscerated by a Ravenous Cannibal.

Click "more" for Hrubovcak's twisted art work and commentary.

This is my fourth album cover for Chainsaw Dissection. Coptercrash Records will release this and two of the band's previous albums, Zombie Decimation and Remnants of the Slaughtered. Chainsaw Dissection is one of the first gore-grind bands I worked with back in the day, and for Zombie Decimation I created the cover art of zombies ripping apart and gutting helpless victims in a cemetery.

The last album I did for the band was less in your face and more subdued and creepy, which I kinda favored. It featured a river of blood and viscera silently floating down a river in the middle of the woods. Perhaps that cover kinda fits in well with this newest illustration, which depicts an insane inbred hillbilly in the middle of the woods gutting his victims next to a warm bone-filled bonfire and toolshed containing body parts. I can kinda picture the last album cover taking place in the background beyond the trees (the river of blood) as, like, an aftermath of the constant horrors that take place in this murderer's secluded campground.

I added in a pig's head nailed to a tree with a joint or cigarette in its mouth and darts stuck in its skull. I had actually seen that done once for real at some underground punk show in backwoods Salisbury, Maryland, so I thought I'd put it in there 'cause I thought it was kinda creepy and it popped in my head while I was working on this.

Other Chainsaw Dissection Cover Art by Hrubovcak

When he's not touring or recording with Monstrosity or Vile, vocalist Mike Hrubovcac is creating ghoulish and ghastly art work for with his company Visual Darkness and sending some of it our way for "Nightmare Visions."

This week, he emailed us some nauseating cover art he designed for Cerebral Incubation. Click "more" to view the art and read what was going on in Hrubovcac's demented mind.

This cover was created for the band Cerebral Incubation on SoulFlesh Collector Records out of Russia. The album was recorded by Randy Thompson of Guttural Secrete.

The band originally wanted a sunny desolate desert scene with a girl left mutilated to rot in the middle of nowhere. It would have been more of a creepy scene with only the one dismembered body as the focus amongst the landscape. Seeing as how I've done hot desert mutilation scenes like that before, (Guttural Secrete, Awaiting the Autopsy, etc.) I recommended something a bit different by changing the scene to a cold, desolate beach. I think this gives it a more eerie or gloomy atmosphere, with dead sea creatures, drift wood and debris littering the beach. Instead of the hot desert feel, its more of a cold, wet and dirty feel. The poor victim lies stuffed in a barrel, dismembered and left to be slowly consumed by crabs, seagulls and eventually the eroding tide of the dead ocean itself.

With an album title like Erection Body Mutilated (Back From the Dead), who else can you count on but death metal frontman and sicko artist Mike Hrubovcac to pen art work that's repulsively appropriate? The cover rendering in question was commissioned by French hardcore industrial group Obszon Geschopf and features two mutilated corpses laying under sheets on autopsy tables in the morgue. We'll let Hrubovcac explain the rest:

Obszon Geschopf frontman Remzi Kelleci wanted something along the lines of cover art I had done for Guttural Secrete and Mortician. Apparently, he's a big fan of gore, death-metal and zombies. For distribution reasons, though, the label wanted to keep it dark and creepy without being overly graphic or gory. They didn't want to run into any the same kind of censorship problems as a lot of the bands that have commissioned me for gory artwork. (click "more" to read more commentary and see the gory art).

I tried to keep this cover sick and morbid without being overly graphic. The main corpse in the front is awakening from the dead with a super hard-on underneath the morgue sheet. I even put a bit of pre-cum dribbles that leaked onto the sheet, as if he's awakening from his wet dream of death, with the girl corpse in the background awakening all horny as well.

Sensing that there's a dead c--k waiting for her, she struggles to reach up and seek it out. I put some blood on her sheet around her crotch to show that maybe she's been molested or messed with down there, which is why her crotch is all bleeding... Possibly from the psychotic Mortician.

This album will be a double-disc CD, and I will also be doing the full packaging art. Remzi's original music comprises disc one, and the second disc features remixes from the likes of Joachim Witt, Cyber Axis, Out Out, and many other shocking industrial bands.

Some song titles include "My First Piece of Meat," "Bloodfeast," "Goresex", "John Wayne Gacy" and "The Love Butcher." BLC Productions is planning to have this out, released, on the street and tearing the walls down by the end of the year.

Here's our favorite demented heavy metal illustrator Mike Hrubovcak of Visualdarkness.com to tell us all about his latest designs for Dutch death grind band Inhume, which will launch a European tour on Halloween. Click "more" to see the merch Mike designed for their road trip:

Inhume will be traveling across Europe promoting their latest album Chaos Dissection Order and they asked me to make a t-shirt for them, but the design they wanted was remake of an iconic image they've been using since 1997. It's a sketch of a strung up, mutilated corpse with amputated legs and it that originally appeared on their 1997 cassette demo The Missing Limb (thanks to artist Misja Baas).

The new version is now full color in all it gruesome glory. Check out Grimness69, Inhume and Disgorge on the "Gore And Chaos Over Europe" Tour and get yourself a shirt!

When denizen of the Underworld, Mike Hrubovcak, isn't fronting death metal bands Monstrosity or Vile, he's hunched over a Mac in his darkened cave creating ghastly heavy metal art to sicken the world. Recently, he's been spending a fair amount of time creating t-shirts, prints and posters of his designs to sell via his online store. But he's still found time to create some new illustrations for various groups. Click "more" to see the art work he's recently done for the new album by Rumpelstiltskin Grinder and to hear his thoughts on the images.

Back in 2005, I did the above cover for Rumpelstiltskin Grinder's album "Buried in the Front Yard...", which featured a wild-eyed psychotic Rumpelstiltskin burying bodies. Now its time to take it to the next level. Here's a sneak peak at the NEW Rumpelstiltskin Grinder album cover for Relapse Records.

Living For Death, Destroying The Rest will be released sometime early 2009. I'm still working on the packaging layout, but I think this cover is the craziest concept to come out in a long time, as well as the hardest (but most enjoyable) cover I've created to date. This cover will fold out into a two page spread and the packaging art will be as crazy as the band themselves. Here are some details from the art work.

These guys are comical enough with the concepts to grab your attention, but have the intense brutality to smash your face with their bludgeoning music. All of the elements of the new art pertain to the lyrical content and stories on the new album. We have the "Cyclops" busting out of the ground in the middle of a city street, "Rumpelstiltskin" on his shoulder (commanding the attack), "Todd the Harpoon Wilson" and "Merman" oddly joining forces together to combat the invasion of underground minions, as well as the ghostly skull from the first track on the CD, "Nothing Defeats the Skull." Other tracks on the album include "Fiends in the Mountain, Ghouls in the Valley", "Beware the Thrash Brigade" and "Revolution of Underground Legions."

Here's the latest nightmarish image by the guru of gore, Mike Hrubovcac. And now a brief description of what the hell he was thinking when he designed this demon for Sinister:

After completing the album cover illustration and packaging design for the new Sinister album, The Silent Howling, I was asked to also do a series of t-shirts around the new album concept as well. Sinister have always incorporated demons into their imagery. Now, with this new album having two 'sinister' looking demon creatures in a church graveyard, we decided to take the scene out of the cemetery and up onto the top of the church steeple. A demon stands clinging to the top of the burning church steeple after ripping off the cross that once adorned it, which is now mockingly displayed inverted within the grasp of the demon.

Other shirt designs are currently underway, but for now you can get your hands on the new album which was released on CD and Digipak through Massacre Records this past month.

Click "more" to stream "Summit of Sacrifice" and "Fortified Bravery" from the latest Sinister album, The Silent Howling.

Sample of The Silent Howling.

Visual Darkness lairkeeper, Mike Hrubovcak checks in with his latest splatterfest. And after the spiritual Zenfest he send us last time, it's good to see him back to his old, violent self..

Its been a while since I've made any "Nightmare Visions" posts, and for this I apologize. Touring and band duties [with Monstrosity and Vile] have been consuming most of my days, but I thought I'd take some time out and share a sneak peak into the album packaging layout for the new Sinister album, which comes out August 22 on Massacre Records.

It will be a 16 page booklet, and will also be released as a special Limited Edition Digipak! I had the honor of hearing some of the new songs, and let me just tell you - this new album is massive! They have truly progressed and I think most Sinister fans will be pleasantly surprised.

Click "more" to preview more of the new album art: