The guitarist of the band- Nochaa, emailed me, as he had a previous artist do the album cover, which the band rejected. The `artwork,' was a photo of a sculpture `lifted from Goggle images,' with some opaque ketchuppy blood dripping down each eye. To me it didn't suggest the album's name- Tortured to Death.
I guess the band wanted something that looked like it took more than 10 minutes to do? I don't know.
Anyway, since they contacted me and I have a fairly sick imagination, I suggested impalement. Have a guy impaled on a spike with tons of blood. I sketched it up, and started to paint. Then the band asked me NOT to add the album name and to add a so-so- (at best IMHO) logo on the cover.
From there, I firmly believed that the impaled guy would not fit the cover, especially in the timeframe of a little over a week deadline. I also had to do the liner notes, disc art, tracklists and art, etc. So with the band's blessings I changed directions and had a bolder design of a sick bastard being pulled apart by chains.
This image is 99.5% the same as what I sent them. For my web page, I painting over the band's logo, because I did not like it, and besides, It wasn't my work.
The piece is not huge, but it is about 2400 pixels wide. Design-wise, I used the chains to bring the viewers eye into the poor tormented soul. I made some custom brushes for the blood splatters.
Incidentally, the enjoyable thing about doing this album cover was I didn't have to do any burning buildings, and I got to paint something more close-up and less epic.
