Turisas – { feuilleton }

Maps and legends

Following the mention yesterday of my facsimile John Speed map I set about searching for the map in question since it’s managed to survive all these years. For the moment I haven’t been able to find it but going through a portfolio of old drawings I finally found this item, a map or chart or the Nine Worlds of Norse mythology which I drew when I was 11 years old. Various family traumas mean a lot of my early artwork hasn’t survived so this drawing is the earliest piece of my work that I own. (Click below for a bigger view.)

Sol in her Sun Chariot. The horse evidently looked better after a second attempt.

I can be specific about my age since I remember drawing this in 1973 shortly after moving to secondary school. The paper is the horrible stuff that was standard issue at that place, rough and terrible for pencil work. I’d been given a new set of coloured pencils so took advantage with this to use just about every colour in the box.

Continue reading “Maps and legends”

New things for June II

Work on two very different CDs was completed this month, a pair of releases so different they’re almost polar opposites. Chaoticum describe their music as “art for your ears” and the label for this album is HORUS CyclicDaemon, producers of the Aleister Crowley anthology I designed in 2005. The package is a digipak and will include a poster which features one of my Great Old Ones portraits.

Eskiboy is UK Grime artist Wiley who’s proved himself notable enough to be featured on the cover of last month’s Wire magazine. This compilation was a commission from Baked Goods in Manchester. I was trying to avoid the obvious tunnel image at first but the label was keen to see something along those lines so this is the result of the usual to-ing and fro-ing which design work often entails.

Meanwhile the CD I designed earlier this year for Turisas is now in the shops and the band is interviewed in this month’s Metal Hammer. I’ll be putting the full artwork for all these releases onto the site over the next week or so.

New things for April II

By an odd coincidence my work manifests in two different forms in Finland this month. Above is the Finnish reprint of ‘King Squid’ by Jeff VanderMeer, part of his City of Saints and Madmen fantasy novel which I designed as a self-contained work. SF magazine Tähtivaeltaja has produced this as a supplement to their latest issue and done a great job of maintaining the look of the original printing.

And in the music world there’s a new CD design for Finnish metal band Turisas. This is their second album, The Varangian Way, a concept affair that describes the journey taken by Viking explorers from the Gulf of Finland to Byzantium via the rivers of Russia. Very bombastic stuff, with choir and orchestra backing the band so it’s probably fitting that I again referenced (ie: swiped) the bloated sun from Bob Peak’s Apocalypse Now poster for the cover.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The poster art of Bob Peak
• New things for April
• City of Saints and Madmen