Gavin Weir and The Infinite Sadness

I was recently commissioned to produce 20 individual tape covers for Brave or Invincible's forthcoming mix compilation. Its a really awesome project to be involved in - mainly because the label are trying to bring back the importance of the physical product to music, something I whole-heartily agree with. Buying music should be more than just having the files imported to your iTunes. There's something special about scanning over the artwork of a well made vinyl (or even cd), thumbing through a booklet and finding little bits of information you might never know (Explosion from Doom anyone?). Of course, there's nothing wrong with digital distribution (my band recently released its first EP via bandcamp), but in order to make people want to buy a physical version, you've got to do something special to make it worth while. What could be more special than one of a kind, hand-made individual artwork?

Not much, I'm sure you'll agree.

So, keeping in mind the 'hand made' nature of the tapes, I broke out my oil paints, inks and acrylics to create an image influenced by 'collections' of covers (like this Jim Lee X-men series: )

So, I pieced the first 16 together, added my regulation masking tape (for texture) and went to town:

A homage to futuristic city scapes from films such as Blade Runner, Brazil and Metropolis. The light from behind the looming tower and the swirling, chaotic nature of the colours foretelling an uprising of the people (in true dystopian fashion).

The second set (4 covers) I used my inks and acrylics to create a 'comic book style' layout:

I first had the idea of a girls face on the right, but didn't really like how much blank space was on the left (also, that would have made the left 2 covers rather dull when separated) I popped a few panels in there. Sadly, due to an unfortunate drip of ink, the top left panel ended up being a lot darker than I intended it. Still, I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out.

Again, this is a really cool project to be involved in, so a big thanks goes to the BOI team for allowing me to be part of it.  You can read more on the mixtapes over on the BOI website: http://boirecords.co.uk/ . Be sure to check out the other artists work because they are all truly amazing.