My homie Blazy from San Antonio reached out to me for his latest project "Cloak & Dagger". Blazy is real good about letting me go a little wild with these pieces and this approach always produces the best results. The direction was simple, something relating to the espionage and mystery of the term "cloak and dagger", the rest was up to me. Given the first cover he had me create, I immediately began to conjure up images of skulls and lots of shadows. Then I started playing with Renaissance imagery, old crowns and thin, pointy daggers.

Thumbnail stage. I sent Blazy three different concepts for front art. We settled on one and would use portions of the front to help save time in creating the back. This stage helps keeps the ideas simple to convey the overall look in a concise manner. Once we had a direction, I scaled up and went to work on a fully-inked illustration, fleshing out details, lighting, and depth. I had to make some adjustments in Photoshop after scanning to get the hand and dagger to fit into the square frame of an album cover.

After rearranging the hands, I laid down my base colors. This step went by rather quickly as I used a lot more shadow to help convey the idea of secrecy and espionage in this one. Adding shades and textures took place to add much more depth to the piece.

I love working on Typography and album covers are always a great time to explore different options within existing art. It's like an additional challenge having to create great type that will fit well with my hand drawn illustrations and then fit well within the constraints of a square frame. This title came together almost immediately which is a bit rare for me. Usually I find myself re-working and re-working. Sometime you get lucky and hit it solid pretty early in the process. The back art came together quickly in that we were using a part of the front art on the back to accompany a tracklist. I kept the final back design concise without a whole lot of busy designs or layouts.

Blazy's new album Cloak & Dagger can be purchased directly from Ruler Why Recordings.