Masters Of Illusion - '3 Championship Rings' Artwork

Back in 2001 or so, I animated a simple animated video for Kutmasta Kurt for his Masters of Illusion LP. The premise was pretty basic. The characters were professional wrestlers, and Kurt's girlfriend is kidnapped. Kurt's wrestling rival turns out to be the culprit, thus a showdown match is scheduled to settle the score.

Fast forward to last summer and Kurt tells me he's planning to rerelease the tracks as singles with custom artwork. I scoured for 'wrestling imagery' as well as vintage Mexican Wrestling posters, but just ended up with ideas that seemed cliche'.

I finally settled on this layout of the Kutmasta Kurt characters standing victorious on a giant pile of all of his defeated opponents. I figured it'd be fun to include easter eggs of some notable figures within the music/ hip hop world.

The layout and illustration was somewhat the easy part. It's one of those concepts that just draws itself. Contorting bodies into positions, piled onto each other. Kurt's concern was that the figures appeared dead and could be expressing a sinister message. I agreed to add ' pain/ distress' effects to the art to show that they were in fact alive!

The colors were another story. When working with a crowd or multiple figures in a composition, it can tempting to give them all distinct varied colors. What usually results it's what's known as 'clown barf'. In other words, colors all fighting each other and making a bit of a mess. What works better is working in colors that adhere to a more tonal or unified palette. And working all the while with the large red and blue theme I had.