Ron Whitehead and Blaak Heat Shujaa Southern California 2012 tour poster

 

The famed and multicontinental Thomas Bellier asked me to do a tour poster for his also multinational band, Blaak Heat Shujaa, with even more famed and lauded poet Ron Whitehead. I've spoken with an even met Thomas briefly before and was psyched to do the work for this poster.  After I started and began listening to their first record I got even more into it and now I'm a fanboy EAGERLY awaiting their next EP and record which will be out on Tee Pee soon, the EP in a week or two and album in 2013.

The deadline was tight but Thomas had an idea which saved time and I had some leftover ideas I added to it that came together nicely. Plus he asked for the hills, desert, clouds and cacti I've been gaining a rep for. Below is the transformation from small sketches, thumbnail and final pencil drawing.

 

Below is some snapshots of the drawing and inking as well as some work in progress examples. The color had to be amped up and given more saturation once I was nearing the finish line, shoulda done a color comp!

 

Buy This poster here: Skillit's Etsy.com shop

Kohoutek "Virginia" tape packaging art

A good friend of mine plays drums for this all things experiment Northeast collective. I met him when we were both living in the DC area and he booked most of the better shows my band played. For that and being a huge Neil Young fan I agreed to do the art for a limited live tape release he's putting out through another friends label. That and I want to get on the tape-art bandwagon the kids are digging these days. 

My friend told me to make it as psychedelic & weird as possible. I listened to the recording a few times then bgan drawing the penciled art you see above. After finishing I decided the first version was going to be hard to redraw so scanned it and inked (or traced) the linework in Photoshop using the tablet as you can also see below. I wanted to make all the outlines of the forms as many different colors as possible and one o the easiest ways to do that is to creat the outlines in Photoshop.  I also wanted to save time by not having to clean up the artwork post-inking in PS as well as work on my tablet skills.

 

I colored the rest of the art as I would normally, blocking in base colors first and then adding highlights and shadows. This time I decided to keep the tones simple, using one highlight and one shadow per part of the composition to keep it simple enough to be readable on a small tape case. 

Here is a detail of the center of the art. I really dug not having any tight direction with this and drawing whatever came into my mind plus the coloring which I tried to push as far as I could into being saturated yet not the brightest or happiest.

THUMB 'Primordial Echoes for Bigfoot' CD packaging art

Click on all images to enlarge them ya'll!

Italian Stonerrock band THUMB got in touch with me to do the art for the newest release after seeing my art their favorite places on the net. I obliged and off we went, below are the layouts they picked from the 3 choices I gave them for each the cover, traycard, cd and inside traycard.

 

Above are some of the black and white art while being drawn and below is the work in progress while coloring.





Above this text is a few details of the art and below this same text are some iPhone pics of the finished packaging printed in it's case.



Last but not least: "Put a Bird On it".