Melvins: Live at Hellfest
Melvins is a band from Montesano, Washington formed in 1983 who continue to tour and release records to this day. The grunge progenitors started as a three piece and have had a revolving door of session and touring musicians, including at one point Shirley Temple's daughter Lori “Lorax” Black. Consistent through their tenure is the mushroom cloud haired Buzz Osbourne and everybody’s favorite drummer Dale Crover. When I first saw them live, they had two drummers front and center stage. I have been hooked ever since. The tracks on this record are taken from a festival in France called Hellfest featuring Coady Willis as the second drummer and Jared Warren on bass from the band Big Business. Live footage of the performance can be found on YouTube and is highly recommended listening while viewing the album artwork.
Front Cover
Back Cover
Gatefold
Challenge
Create a vinyl record cover for a set of music from a 2011 festival appearance.
Timeframe
13 weeks.
Role
Art Director, Illustrator, Layout
Tools
Illustrator, Photoshop, Wacom Tablet
Solution
The inspiration for the design came from the costumes Buzz wears on stage. The cloak covering his face in the concert footage reminded me of the character Mort from Bazooka Joe comics. Further ideation led to the decision to create individual comics for each track listing with lyrics from the songs filling the speech bubbles.
Process
Creating the front and back cover for the album was a relatively painless experience. I researched Bazooka Joe bubble gum packaging and stayed on brand for the front cover. The back gives a little taste of what's inside. The inside of the record took another year of skill building as I didn’t yet have the talent at the time or the file management systems in place to properly mimic the vintage bubble gum wrappers. The first stage was sketching out the comics on paper. They were then brought into photoshop and traced using a Wacom tablet. Minimal colors and backgrounds were added before each separate file was placed under one banner. The borders of the panels were then lined before going through a system of effects to make each comic look individually ragged. Meanwhile objects were found to be masked and paired with each song and processed using another system of effects. The fun part was pairing the nonsense lyrics to the comics I drew. The gag heavy quality of the original wrappers led to fun scenes between the band mates I hope fans of the music can enjoy.
Source Material
loaded with gags
saturated with spot colors
send away for objects
Funny Pages
