This project was a bit of a labour of love for me, and sort of spanned both the illustration and concept art sides of my interests. Long story short, myself and two good friends spent a year working on an album inspired by Benjamin Christensen's 1922 silent horror film Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages. It was initially intended to be a one-off live performance, improvised to the film, but eventually we came to the decision to record it. Below on the left is the original (unfinished) poster I drafted up for the never-to-occur event, which I retrospectively wanted to involve in the album art some way.
The image to the right (above) was my initial sketch, a messy pencil job that I roughly digitally coloured. Although it was unfocused, I thought maybe I could combine the governing figure of the demonic goat-creature with the textural folds of the weird cyclops-monster from the original poster.
Once I was happy with the overall shape of the sketch, I began to block in some basic colour. I had decided to take a more psychedelic route - focusing on weirder, more lurid tones to add a slightly different dimension to a witch cult than the usual black cats and broomsticks approach.
Later iterations of the image involved a gradual build-up of tone. I found repeatedly that darker was better for this kind of thing, so I tried to make the demonic figure more and more like a vacuum, a black hole that was the antithesis of the colourful world around it.
The final image involved mainly a painstaking amount of close up detail and shading (for whatever reason, I decided not to use any custom brushes for the duration of the project) and a film grain filter pack applied through Premier.
We ended up printing the artwork in altered colour on casettes (in classic underground band style) and distributed them primarily via bandcamp. Below is an embed of the album should you desire to delve into sunless occult depths!
