Pyramido Tales

I'm really a terrible blogger, but on the other hand I'm glad I also have dayjobs enough to pay the bills. It will take some more guts on my side before I dare take the leap and actually take my work seriously. Blah, blah, blah.

Anyway, here is my latest work for Pyramido; album cover, inlay and a t-shirt design.

This is the cover for Pyramido's new album ”Saga”, which will be out this month.

I'm usually given a few inspirational words or a picture to point out the general direction, and this time I got the colour green and Hans Arnold's fantastic cover for ABBA's greatest hits albums.

There also came up an idea about depicting the band members in animal shapes,and since they're fond of the swedish phenomenon “fika”, which includes coffee and pastry, I thought they should gather in the forest and enjoy just that, around the camp fire.

The surroundings are scattered with details relating to the band and their collaborators in different ways, and for the backdrop I drew inspiration from renaissance art landscapes, from Giorgione, Dürer, Bruegel and their likes.

The album inlay also required some illustration and I got the notion to stack the animals, roaring, on top of each other, just like in the Grimm tale of the Town Musicians of Bremen. The same picture is also made into a tote bag, shown here.

 

The T- shirt shows the same bandimals having a brawl about the last scraps of “fika”.

A nice job, all together. One can't go wrong with animals and fairy tales.

Pyramido and Graveyard is the new black

This is the new design for the Pyramido hoodie that will be sold on their tour in April. The print will be on the front in a bloodish red. Inspiration here is a spinet case from around 1550 in the fabulous V&A museum.

And this is a concoction by Pyramido, merely passed through the Anna- filter. Quite a tasteful filtering though. The bird on the pot is what we in Sweden call a "Kaffegök". The word is generally associated with little old ladies, cookies, crocheting and booze, or in this this case very, very old men with the same attributes.

To my utter delight I was asked by Graveyard to make a poster for the Manchester gig on their tour with Horisont, starting tomorrow. They have a different poster for every concert, made by different artists. Among them Alan Forbes! 

The issue here was to keep my ambitions, and thereby angst, on a reasonable level. After the obligatory artistic agonies and a couple of killed darlings, this is what I came up with. 

The letters are essentially theft. Otherwise it's a knot of monsters and demons at each-others throats, including Kerberos ( here deprived of one of his heads in a little homage to Roky ), his Norse counterpart Garm, Marduk, a chimera, a basilisk, a cocatrice (also being hatched by the toad) and  Jörmungandr, all being played by the instigator Ratatosk and all in a Bilibin- inspired frame.

There are 50 printed and they will be sold at the gig. Yay me! /A.

Mythological wildlife

At long last, an update on this forsaken blog of mine.
Lately I' ve been sorting out some of the vast family archives
since work was a bit thin on the ground.
When Pyramido was to do some gigs with Lock-Up however, need arose for a new t-shirt.
Hence, there came the sea-goat, a somewhat stupid creature of the deep sea, a cruel tool to make the bidding of his third eye. Or it was just an inspiration from Finding Nemo, which I had just seen with   my daughter. It is silver on black and came out pretty damn nice.

These last weeks I have been pondering what materials to use for a cassette- cover, believe it or not. The band is Skogen brinner from Linköping, very agreeable indeed.
They liked the cover for “Salt”, and gave me the cover of Ramases “Space Hymns” for inspiration, though with mountains rather than space.
My mind as usual started tossing together things from the most disparate sources, and out came this: 
Bosch, Kittelsen, Tolkien's drawings, and the Roc from Arabian Nights blended, more or less.

This will be released on Ljudkassett shortly.
Be sure to get one and bring me some work /A.

Recent work for Pyramido

So this is my watercolour for the cover of  the new Pyramido album Salt. My guidelines were : white, sci-fi, 70's and desert, if I remember correctly. My inspiration was a little bit of Star Wars, Terry Gilliam movies and to some extent The Princess Bride for some reason or other. Reactions from reviewers and friends so far span between high praise and utter disgust. Everything Pyramido aimed for, then.
It´s hard to do the colours justice in this medium, they aren´t quite as garish as shown here.

And here´s the new tee, which should be lighter grey than appears on my screen at least.
I´ll be back when my recent inspiration for hand stiched period costume has waned, or when I get a new mission, obviously.

Golden oldies

So. Got something to do already (thanks Klara!), and while awaiting the release of the new Pyramido album before I publish my most recent work for them here, I continue with the less recent.

Firstly, here we have my t-shirt design for Kamikatze from 2008. Still like it!

A simple logo for The Quiet Sings, 2009.

Cover design for Pyramido, 2009. They wanted a menacing-looking elephant and according to the reviews for the album, of which many commented the cover, I gave them one! It's nice indeed to know when you've hit your mark with something.

Same elephant as t-shirt.

My latest t-shirt design for Pyramido (2010) was a bit off the beaten path, so to speak. After an internal joke, of which there are many in that band - trust me, I got the assignment to draw an "apkatt". This is my interpretation. I guess I thought of those weird Victorian illustrations in children's books, Aesop's fables and such like.

OK, that's it for now. Still more to come. /A.

A Start

A self taught illustrator of sorts, until now primarily doing design work for bands of my acquaintance. Is at present attempting to make it on my own and this blog is the first step.

I work with the classic tools: pen, ink and brush on paper, take inspiration from many sources after studies in art- and book history and is up for jobs of any size.

To start with, I'm posting some of the older work of my production, both computer finished and just scanned originals.

This is the cover, front and back, for the record Hidden Wings with the band Silent Scream. Never released, but a nice cover all the same (2006). I also did some drawings for the booklet, to be posted later.

A 1970's- scented poster for the excellent band Pyramidos' first gig in 2008.

An ambigram T-shirt design for the eminent band Witchcraft (2009) which was printed purple on black. Medieval manuscripts and 16^th century woodcuts was the triggers.

Poster for a gig in 2009 with Sanctuary in Blasphemy, Sonic Ritual and Wraptors. I get inspiration from band names as well as their music, in this case especially the former. The occult is always near at hand, it seems.

T-shirt design for Pyramido (2010), sprung in equal measure from Yggdrasil and the Tree of life/knowledge. This is how it looked in print.

More to come and the more work the merrier me!
annawidengard@gmail.com
/A