Joe McDonald & The Walkin’ Hawks

Print + Package Design

A friend of mine, Joe McDonald, approached me to create an album cover and a few promotional products for his first album with ‘the Walkin’ Hawks’. The name of the album was to be ‘Underground Rattlesnake Party’.

For this project, the mandate was simple. Get inspired by the album name and the organic blues sounds to create something fun, funky, and a little bit psychedelic. I wanted to carve a woodcut or linocut for this project, since I thought the volume of the lines would make a really interesting ‘house of mirrors’ effect when I carved that many scales close together.

Joe also wanted to have a separate, fun illustration showing the ‘walkin’ hawk’ in a different style — something that could be put on merch to be sold at shows.

Concept

Working with the idea of the Underground Rattlesnake Party, I decided to portray the snakes almost like a disco ball, all twisted up - I planned to overlay my carving onto some colourful marbled textures to make them feel almost jeweled. I wanted them to give the impression they were ‘underground’, so I left the background completely dark and the text minimal, and let the snakes have all the fun.

PROCESS

I originally started the carving (which I planned to make digital later) on a 2 foot piece of linoleum - which was not giving me what I wanted. The cuts were too coarse, and I couldn’t get the precision or level of detail that I was looking for – the type of lines that would create that twisty, psychedelic effect. So after some attempts at creating the look digitally (not quite the same, sigh) and starting again with finer tools (still not detailed enough), I bit the bullet and decided to work big. Really big.

The final piece ended up being about the size of my coffee table (4’ x 2’), and was carved into a giant MDF board. It ended up making a pretty cool, if not heavy, piece of art, and the detail was just the way I had imagined it. I inked it up, digitized it, and added colour underneath, and it ended up being well worth the thorough vacuum job that I had to do later.

Deliverables

Printed Packaging

Digital Products

Bonus Project: Y.E.S.

A few years later I had the pleasure of designing a digital EP cover for Joe’s new electronica project, Y.E.S. It gave me a fun opportunity to digitally paint something ethereal, dynamic, and otherworldly – something just a little bit “out there”. I had a great time matching the ambience of the music to a surreal scene – I thought touching clouds represented the feeling of the music perfectly.