NAME THAT ALBUM COVER! - set1

All righty, folks. Here is the first five (of ten) album cover tribute drawings. As stated before, I have taken ten existing album covers - carefully chosen for their iconic/memorable imagery (but not too iconic and recognizable!) and reworked them in varying degrees of artistic license. But there is no doubt that they are referencing the source material - none of them will "kinda" match a particular album cover. Side-by-side with the original, it will be obvious.

Once again, feel free to make comments and crack wise, but keep your answers/guesses to yourself until I have posted the last five images which will be next Tuesday (March 29th) at 11:00pm Eastern Standard Time. First person to "comment" the correct band/singer and album title for all ten wins the original artwork shown in the previous post.

Good luck!

CONTEST PRIZE:

So, should you have the best eye for recognizing album covers through my re-envisioned pencil drawing guises (as explained in the previous post), here is the glorious prize that awaits you:

A handsome 9"x12" acrylic painting depicting an angry minotaur and his magical warhammer of pollution! More specifically, it is a painting done for the M10 set of the Magic: The Gathering TCG and is called "Canyon Minotaur". I personally like this little piece though I get the idea from MTG gamers that the card itself isn't stellar. Alas, you don't win a little Magic card with minimal collectible value - you get a one-of-a-kind painting with which you can brag to your buddies and family how you dominated Prescott's little contest to win! Boo-yah!

Anyhoo, that's what is at stake. Expect the first set of skewed album tributes to be posted Monday March 21. Though you are welcome to make comments, I encourage you to keep your guesses and answers to yourself until after the second set has been posted.

See you on Monday!

NAME THAT ALBUM CONTEST!: rules and regulations

The other day I was checking out and otherwise waxing nostalgic on cool album cover art and found myself contemplating that the days of album cover art notoriety and recognition (much like music videos - stupid MTV programming....) is waning thanks to music downloading and the death of music stores. I love album cover art as much, I'm sure, as all of you do - and I've been wanting to do a couple homages on my draw-blog for a while now. Well, I came up with an idea and am now currently finishing up a series of TEN sketches that pay tribute to various album covers.

The pencil drawings will be tributes to the original album covers but will not be exact representations - I'll have trimmed them down and put my own personal skew onto them in varying degrees but there'll be no doubt that they are a pencilly homage to their real counterpart.

In order to win the contest, you will have to be the first to name all ten albums (and the bands/artists, too!). I will post two sets of five spaced by a week or so. Upon posting the second set, the first person to list all ten in the "comments" column will win the original artwork.

To answer your skepticism, none of the albums are mega-obscure bootlegs or German imports or anything like that - but they're not anything as immediately and universally recognizable as "Abbey Road" or "Thriller" or anything by Christian-metal supergroup Stryper either. You may get some right away but have to get an audiophile pal to help you out on others (I don't want this to be TOO easy!).

I have no idea how this will go - someone might get them all right away or maybe it'll be too hard. If the latter is the case, I'll start dropping hints - but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Ok, so there's that. I'll post the artwork that'll be up for grabs by Thursday and hopefully the first salvo of draw-blogified album tributes by the beginning of next week (as well as let you know the exact day and time I will post the last five images!).

Until then, start thumbing through your 8-track, vinyl, cassette tape, and CD collections to get your juices flowin'!

WIN AN ORIGINAL PAINTING!!!!

First of all, the above sketch has nothing to do with anything. I just felt like I needed to post a piece to fill in the vacancy - even if it IS a drawing I did many years ago.

Secondly, I am announcing an upcoming contest that I will be putting on this here Draw-Blog starting sometime later this month. The prize will be an ORIGINAL PIECE OF ARTWORK which I have yet to pick out. Most likely it will be a Magic: The Gathering illustration in hopes to loop in as much interest as I can get.

What kind of hoops will I require you to jump through to win this contest? Well, you'll have to stay tuned to find out but (hint) if you're a music lover, you may have an edge.

AFRICAN ART MONTH! 6

Well, I didn't get to post nearly as many pics as I wanted to in this series - my schedule got busy and bottlenecked quickly - but that's the way it goes.

For this last piece I thought I'd do a little "two-birds-with-one-snowball". I'm doing a painting demo at Morehead University this week and needed something somewhat interesting for that - and I needed one more good post for this series, as well.

Among so many other really cool and inspiring things found in my collection of books about African tribes and such are the tribes that incorporate mud into their hair styles. I found a handful of pictures of Namibian people with this gorgeous reddish clay mucked into their hair into different fashions - and so this girl was inspired by some of that - except I made her clay-mucked hair even more organic and weird. Should be a fun one to paint.

Again, if you're in the Kentucky or southern Ohio area, come check out some of my original fantasy paintings hanging in the Strider Gallery at Morehead University. They're only up for another five days or so. I'll also be doing a presentation about my work and career on Thursday - (plus the demo but I think that may be exclusive for the art students perhaps?).

Also, and as usual, if you like the pencil drawings you see here, you may very well like my book of pencil work: AGGREGATE. Wanna buy one? Contact me at: steve2@rottface.com

See you next month!

AFRICAN ART MONTH! 5

Sorry about the long lapse in posts - been busy as well as enjoying a bit of solar radiation down in Florida.

As I try and bust out four paintings in 8 days, I'll have to dip into my reserve of older sketchbook drawings yet again. This is another from 7 or 8 years ago with some African flavor. Her hair is more Hopi indian - but I have a big book on just African tribe hair styles and there are a few that closely resemble that Hopi look. I don't think any had exclusive copyrights on the hair though.

Hopefully I can squeeze in one more drawing before the end of African Art Month and the beginning of a new series that will be part of a contest to win a free original painting of mine - so spread the word!

On a side note - if you happen to be within reasonable driving distance of Morehead University in Morehead, Kentucky, I have 12 fantasy paintings on display in the Strider Gallery through March 3rd. The paintings are from a handful of jobs from the past 6 years or so - all framed up and looking sharp. Come on over and take a look!

AFRICAN ART MONTH! 4

This is an old piece - done about 7 or 8 years ago.

I love the idea of giant, ungainly masks and ceremonial garb.