MidwestLove Art & Design

Excuse my absence. There’s been a lot of work lately, which in theory is good, but it means less time to post. Plus I’ve been avoiding making this particular post for a while now because I knew I would end up getting pretty in-depth with it, but the list of stuff I want to show you is wracking up, so I figured I best just get down to it. This was initially going to be one long post, but I figured I’d break it into a couple. So, grab a cup of coffee or whatever and settle in for a good long read. Or just skip ahead and look at the nice pictures and make up your own story. That’s totally fine by me.

My rock band The Felix Culpa took a good two years to write and record our latest album, “Sever Your Roots”, which in turn gave me way too much time to overthink, unthink and rethink the concepts for the album art. I ended up collecting hundreds upon hundreds of images of type treatments and photographs that I wanted to feed into the creative process, and when it came down to it, the artwork was an amalgam of some of that inspiration but also some good old fashioned spur of the moment happenstance.

First off, I wanted the album art to be cold, intriguing and kinda random. I wasn’t so much concerned with making something that was “totally cool!” as I was finding imagery that was interesting, and since it was my own band’s project I had the freedom to attempt to create something that was thought provoking rather than merely palatable. I was totally ok with people saying “I’m not sure if I like this” as long as it stuck in their heads after seeing it.

That brings us to my first concept which was to take a picture of the band standing in the middle of a swamp at daybreak:

I don’t know where this idea came from really, it was just an image that I wanted to capture. So, I somehow convinced my band and a photography crew (photographer and band wife Andrea Coan, assisted by Twan Huynh and Nabeel Shaikh) to trek out into the middle of a swampy nature preserve owned by some good friends of the family at 5:00 am on the 1st of December… in Wisconsin. It was very. very. cold. But, regardless everyone was in high spirits and willing to make it happen.

Since this was my grand idea, I only thought it fair that I be the one to strap on the hip-waders and risk drowning in an attempt to locate a place in the middle of the water that had adequate footing for the band to stand on. But upon closer inspection, we found that the swamp had shallow banks which immediately turned into a steep 15+ foot drop into a quicksand like silt floor. I was almost swallowed into the water a couple times while figuring this out, by torch light in the pitch black no less.

It turned out that in order to find a place that we could actually stand, we had to create one. We found a relatively narrow part of the swamp (dubbed the frog pond) and actually made a “floor”. What you can’t see under us in the picture are planks of wood and large pieces of cardboard placed along a submerged ladder that was precariously balanced on the opposite shores. This pond was actually about 6 to 7 feet deep but it was impossible to tell exactly how deep because the makeshift floor kept sinking wherever you’d stand on it. As each band member came out into the water, it sunk a little further. I’m not going to lie. It got scary.

After securing a “floor”, we got everyone else got into position. Since I couldn’t remove the hip-waders, I had to simply pull them down below water level (I’m actually still wearing them in the picture). Dre snapped about 5 minutes worth of pictures right as the sun came up, leaving us just enough time to retreat before we lost complete feeling to our lower halves. I’m not going to say it was an all together pleasant experience, but the image came out almost exactly like my initial sketches, so that’s gotta be worth something.

Next on the docket, build a seven foot tall creature out of darkness and scribbles:

We nicknamed him Grand Champion. He was constructed by myself, band mate Joel and photographer Andrea using chicken wire that we spray painted black and then wrapped in 1500 feet of black bailing twine. He took almost an entire day to build. Here he is in mid-construction.

The plan was to have him photographed in various wooded areas as if he had just stepped out of the trees. We took a variety of pictures featuring him propped up in different places, but ultimately we ended up placing him back in the same exact swamp the band stood in, only this time at night fall, tying in the imagery just a little.

Here’s me positioning him in the swamp, again wearing the hip-waders:

The initial idea was to place LED lights in his head for eyes, but we actually ran out of daylight before we had to just go ahead and shoot, so unfortunately the eyes had to be added digitally in post using good old Photoshop. The yellow light that you see coming across the back of these photos was actually Joel’s car headlights. Tricks of the trade, kids. Tricks of the trade.

The final image made for a great 12″ LP cover, and in turn became the “unofficial” digital cover. It’s by no means a typically “prefect” image, but that’s what I love about it. I wanted it to feel more like a snapshot of a mythical creature spotting than a staged portrait for a cover shoot. I wanted it to be imperfect and weird, for better or worse, and overall memorable.

Here’s a picture of the entire double LP package, complete with clear/black swirled vinyl and hand silkscreened dust sleeve. Pretty swank.

And of course if you’re at all interested, you can pick up your very own copy of the double LP through Youth Conspiracy Records. Thanks!

You can also read about the making of the CD packaging.

 -marky

Here’s a look at the Special Edition CD packaging for my rock band The Felix Culpa’s album, “Sever Your Roots”. This cover image features these great antique letterpress blocks that I scanned individually and assembled with minimal retouching in Photoshop. This was incredibly fun to put together and turned out exactly how I wanted. Some of us in the band actually wanted this to be the official cover, but with every music site on the internet set up to display only square imagery, it was just easier to use the LP cover. I actually liked the idea of having different covers for the same release.

Now, I know what you’re thinking… “this doesn’t look like a CD package”. You’re right. For this project, I actually had the opportunity to design a special “extended digipak”. The die was designed and constructed specifically for this release. Here’s a look at the specs:

Initially I had wanted to combine photography and ink spatter like illustration for the overall look of this album packaging, but as it progressed I branched out and just combined a lot of random elements.

This was one of the illustrations that came out of those ink spatter sketching sessions, and really the only unifying part to all of this packaging. I ended up using these “roots” all over everything from merch to the actual disc face to the download cards to the LP dust sleeves to tie it all together:

Since this was to be the “special edition” packaging, the initial plan was to have a full booklet. I didn’t want to just typeset the lyrics, so I actually asked my band mates to each pick their favorite couple of songs and hand write them using whatever medium they wanted. One of them was even done in white out on black gaff tape. Unfortunately time and budget constraints left us without the ability to do the full booklet, but I utilized a few of the lyric pieces for the interior of the packaging. Here are some of them complete and unedited. I thought the band did an incredible job on them, and they are all really quite stunning on their own. I wish we would’ve been able to feature them all.

Hope you’ve enjoyed this look into the CD packaging. There are a very, very few copies of this special edition packaging left over at the Culpa merch store if you’re at all interested. Thanks.

-marky

…go and buy my good friend Kevin Andrew Prchal’s new CD Eat Shirt & Tie. It’s by far one of the best things I’ve hear this year, local or otherwise. Not only is he a fantastic musician and performer, but he’s a big ol sweetheart of a guy. Even though I had nothing to do with his artwork, my band Venna plays with him all the time and it’s always a pleasure. Get in on this guy’s stuff early before you have to pay tons of money to see him play amphitheaters.

www.KevinAndrewPrchal.com

-marky

Over the last year or so I’ve gotten to play a handful of shows with and get to know Zach Pietrini and the members of his band, The Broken Bones, an awesome Americana-flavored folk rock ensemble from the northern Chicago area. Formed around the songwriting chops of Zach, the latest incarnation of the band consists mostly of the members of the now defunct Ammi, another great band that I used to hang around and play shows with. For what it’s worth, I hope that my friends never stop making music. I don’t know what I’d do with myself.

Anyway, The Bones wanted this release to evoke an organic, illustrated and woodsy feel, which is totally appropriate for their sound. My wife (and fellow Venna band mate) Heather was asked to sing back up vocals on this project, so I was fortunate enough to hear the songs from their rough demo stage to the final mixes. Being so familiar with the project gave me a good sense of what to do with their packaging. I definitely wanted to give it little more character apart from the standard brown paper bag your average folk-rock tends to come in. Apparently to me, that means anthropomorphic mice and snails marching their way through a thicket.

The final product was the result of a few different ideas that culminated into a number of sketches, most of which ended up getting thrown out. The project really only started taking shape once the band settled on the title The Bright and Shining Lights: of Anywhere Else. I ended up sketching out the main front cover foliage as one drawing. I then inked each “layer” of foliage sperately on tracing paper and then scanned and layered them in Illustrator. The individual layers were then digitally painted in Photoshop. Phil of The Bones put it best when he described it as having a Don Bluth-ish quality (a fantastic compliment by the way… thanks, Phil). It actually does remind me of The Secret of Nimh, which was an unintentional but definitely welcome outcome.

Here’s the full outside Digipac & full process disc face-

These are being printed up by the always reliable Sooper Dooper up in Madison, WI. They do a great job and I can’t wait to get these back.

Leave me some comments… let me know what you think!

-marky

The Chairs, a truly excellent and fairly prolific young band from Appleton, WI had already put out a 12 song full length, and two digital EPs this year when they approached me about doing some custom, special-edition type packaging for a short run of physically released copies of their upcoming full length. The album was to be called “Nine Ways”, featuring nine songs each revolving around a character meeting his or her end. Thus, lead singer and primary songwriter Alex Schaaf suggested we adhere to the theme of “nine ways to kill a man” for the cover art.

Since we were doing custom packaging on a short run scale, Alex also thought it would be cool to approximate the look of an actual hardcover-bound book containing the disc and liner notes, rather than the typical CD jewel case and insert. An awesome idea that I was totally down for. My first thought was to order a small quantity of actual blank books and silk screen the covers, but that proved to be cost prohibitive. So in lieu of that, I figured we could raid the thrift stores and libraries for old used books that we would then re-cover… in essence we would make “book jackets” for our used books like your teachers made you do in high school for your textbooks. And, since the album was basically nine separate stories and we were going to be printing and assembling the covers ourselves, I decided to do nine individual covers, each one visually representing the method of fatality described in a different song.

The covers were first sketched out as overly stylized, almost comical representations of the subject matter. But as I got into the painting of them, it turned out that they needed to be more realistic in order to not make the project look silly. They were all painted digitally, which was my one regret. I wish I would have had the time or the budget to do them on actual canvas. On the whole, I think they turned out pretty great and they go together well, and the band was happy with them which is always the most important thing. It was hard for us to pick out a favorite to use as the standalone cover for online and digital use, but we ended up going with “drowning” in the end.

You can view the rest of the covers at The Chairs website here.

The album itself is incredibly catchy, cleverly written avant-pop loaded with charm and dark humor. I would strongly recommend checking it out for yourself as it is definitely one of the most promising local releases I’ve heard this year. You can also download their past stuff here, most of it for free. What’s not to love about free.

Let me know what you think.

-marky

UPDATE 11/2/09 -

The guys in The Chairs were nice enough to send me a sample copy of one of the books, so I got some pics for you to check out. Here you go-

Sorry for my lag in posting lately. I have been unbelievably busy, and this posts is only coming at the exchange of sleep, seeing as it’s 2:30 in the morning. Carrying on with business…

Awesome little pop-punk band from Chicago The American Autumn wrote an eight song EP full of catchy, lovable pop songs hopped up on mall food court sodas and PBR called Do You Like Me? Yes/No/Maybe. They asked me to draw some stuff for it that didn’t have anything to do with passing notes. This left me in a bewildered state for about 2 months while I pretended to know what I was going to do. In the end it turned out all right, as I came up with an idea that was mildly ambiguous but still along the lines of “Do You Like Me?”. I figured, if I kept it bright and heartwarming it should be ok.

This project consists of pages of old vintage paper from my wife’s grandfather’s journal, some vintage typewriter keystrokes also provided by my wife (who should probably have gotten some sort of artist-assistant credit in this project) and this little bear and bird that have been hanging out in my sketch book pages for a while. I had really been wanting to find a project to properly draw them for, and they just happened to fit nicely into the concept for this EP.

Ah yes, the concept… mostly, I just wanted to get across the idea of “adventuring off of the pages that we’re drawn onto”… or something lofty (silly?) like that. So, I drew the little explorers venturing off to sea and whatnot and eventually saying goodbye. I had a few other illustrations of them, but there was limited space in the layout so I had to just choose the ones that I liked best. All in all, I was pretty pleased with it and so were the American Autumn guys… who are awesome guys, by the way. Check them out.

Let me know what you think!

-marky

Here’s a last minute logo for local rock-n-roll band Look Out! Giants. They wanted something bold, embellished and “southern” looking to match their music. Not sure if this is truly “southern” or not, but it is apparently what they were after, so… score! I would’ve liked to do more with it… balance it out a bit better and such, but I had a single day to turn it around due to the fact that the guys at Synapse were rolling out the Giant’s new myspace and the band wanted the logo to be part of the redesign on launch. Tall order, but it worked.

You can check out the band and the logo in play over at their myspace page.

-marky

Here’s some little guys I’m currently working on for a CD project… just thought I’d put up a quick look.

I’m a bit behind in posting stuff, due to the fact that I’ve been mind-eatingly busy. But, here’s a quick one off for my band The Felix Culpa that I figured I’d put up. This, as well as the elephant shirt will be available for our little jaunt around the midwest at the end of the month. I thought this illustration, although not intended, came out looking almost like something that could fit in the current Where The Wild Things Are movie campaign. Is that braggy? I don’t want to sound braggy.

1 color on American Apparel 2001 black tee.

-marky

New T-shirt illustration for my band The Felix Culpa. We should have these for our upcoming tour this fall.

2 color print on American Apparel Athletic Heather Blue.

-marky