Guf & Rigos '420' album cover artwork

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Art-direction & Photography: Anton Scut36 Volkov

Illustration & Design: Ivan Pozdnyakov

Lettering: Kirill Sirotin

In the beginning of 2014 Guf asked me to help him with the cover artwork for the upcoming joint album with Rigos, an MC from Saint-Petersburg. The name of the album is '420' and the main theme of the album is obviously weed. After that he invited me to his place to discuss the ideas for the artwork. This photograph of Guf and Rigos I took later would become the main promo image of the release campaign.

Guf just moved to his new private house out of town so he made a little tour inside of it for me.

After the tour ended we settled ourself in so called chill-zone on the attic where Guf played some demo-tracks from the upcoming album. As he wanted the cover to be drawn I started showing him the works of different artists. Finally Guf liked the illustratons of Ivan Pozdnyakov most.

I sent the photographs I made at Guf's place to Ivan as the reference and explained the idea of the artwork. You can check the process of Ivan's work below:

After Ivan was done with the illustration for the face cover I asked Kirill Sirotin to create a lettering for the artwork.

The long and fascinating process started right after I got the final lettering from Kirill:)

Kirill also created the '420' lettering that would be later used as a print for promo t-shirts.

I sent the photograph of the lettering to Ivan, he merged it with the illustration and created a design for the digipak-style cd case.

Despite of this version of the cover was banned by the label (Warner Music) and the final cover was changed beacuse of the censorship, it was shown to public long before the album was released and had a huge impact in the hip-hop community and social media so it stayed considered by fans as the official cover.