Doing Album Covers and Others

I've just finished illustrating and coloring an album cover for California based heavy metal band Crescent Shield. Click here to listen to some of their music from their upcoming album. I'll post the cover here as soon as I'm able to. I'm just waiting for them to publicly post it themselves.

This is the 3rd album I've done solo so far. The first was for Filipino-American Folk Artist Cholo Paz for his "Balik sa Carriedo" album. I really love that collection of songs, specially "Anting Anting", a song I recorded off the radio and listed to constantly back in the mid 90's during the huge Pinoy band explosion. As soon as the cassette was available, I bought it right away. I was truly honored to be asked to do the cover for the CD version.

This is a write up I did for the album back in 1997, hosted at Cholo's site.

The second one I've done was for San Pablo based band "Mellow Del Prado" for their "V-Necks and Neckties" album.

I had assisted Whilce Portacio in putting together Rivermaya's TRIP album years ago, where I had inked many of the interior "portraits" of the band members. I also remember working with Whilce on another cover for Andrew E, but the artwork was never used.

Working on this heavy metal album cover this time around was an interesting experience. It's a type of music that I actually like, and I listened often to the music in their MySpace account as I was doing it. It's one of the first full color jobs I've done outside of comics, and I see myself doing more of it in the future. Not too much though, as I don't want to take away serious time away from doing my comics.

But it does help that you can do these kinds of things so you diversify a bit, and not be too restricted to comics. As much as I love doing it, there's a danger of boredom if that's all I ever do. It's also the reason I'm experimenting with shooting and putting together videos, doing bits of writing outside of comics, doing logos and caricatures and other things.