Every once in a while (once a year, to be precise, is their current rate) my favourite band,
The Mechanisms, a storytelling folk-rock cabaret group composed of nine immortal space pirates, put out a new album, and I am lucky enough to be commissioned to do interior artwork for the CD booklets. Below are the last two years' worth of album illustrations, one for their debut album, Once Upon A Time (In Space) which was sea shanties/folk songs telling the tale of a civil war in an evil space empire populated by fairy tale characters, and one for this year's delightfully dark Ulysses Dies At Dawn, which is a lot more noirish and jazzy and about cyberpunk gangsters in a planet which is one huge city, this time based off Greek myth.
Sunday night they debuted the first song ever performed from the new album, which will be called High Noon Over Camelot and be a Western-themed retelling of Arthurian legend set on a space station slowly falling into the sun. Needless to say, I am jazzed, and can't wait until the album's all written and ready for me to obsessively illustrate for months on end.
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| Once Upon A Time In Space (unedited)//gouache on watercolour board//~70 hours//early 2012 |
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| Penelope's Vault (unedited version)//gouache on mountboard//~160 hours |
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