Cage the Elephant
Cage the Elephant is one of my favourite bands. I love creating poster art and illustration art about musicians I admire and it’s something I really enjoy doing.
For my surprise this illustration was seen by the band and they contacted me for
a collaboration. The design ended up on their merchandise as t-shirts!
In 2020 they won Grammy for Best Rock Album for “Social Cues”.
“Social Cues” was album that I couldn’t stop listening to when it came out. When I saw the cover art I was obsessed with it and i knew this was going to be my favourite.
Social Cues took musical cues from ‘80s horror films scored by John Carpenter, I wanted to express some 80s feeling in my illustration as well. I’m a really big admirer of this decade and I wanted to do a proper research of how the 80s horror movie posters looked like back then. I saw some similarities between all of them - they often use stairs, houses, fire, skulls, exaggerated lighting , blood, triangular compositions.
One of my favourite songs in this album is “House of Glass”, so that’s how the idea about a glass platform came. The band is standing in some kind of futuristic structure.
When I first started sketching I had an idea for the composition - I imagined the band around flames, dust, smoke. I was hypnotized by these 80s horror movie posters. But when I inked the characters , I started changing the places of each member and then this idea wasn’t good for me anymore.
So I went with my very first idea - the platform and the band. I drew the members on separate papers so i can have the option to change their positions if needed. I went for rectangular composition as it brings “going in circles” effect - just like how i was listening to this album. I also wanted to have this feeling for a room but at the same time open space. Like you are in two different dimensions. When you listen to their music you hear so many sounds and really incendiary gradation of them - I wanted to include that as well.
As for the colours - Blue and red are part of their new album colour scheme. In “Ready to let go” there is this line: “ I was blue your dress was red, ain't it strange? “ .
So I chose to stand near by this colours but made them look more like “faded from the sun”- just like a poster on the wall that stood there for years as a hint for how many years i’m listening to them.
The really big hearts of Cage The Elephant released this special edition t-shirt with all proceeds going to their tour family/crew who are currently out of work due to Covid-19.
Thank you for reading and appreciating my work!
