Watercolor illustrations – homages to Philippine indie cinema and the Pinoy rock scene

“Ang Nawawala” inspired artwork created with permission from Director Marie Jamora
“Rakenrol” inspired artwork created with permission from Director Quark Henares
“Ang Huling El Bimbo,” “Ligaya,” and “Lightyears” inspired artworks created with permission from the Eraserheads (Ely Buendia, Buddy Zabala, Raymund Marasigan, and Marcus Adoro)

Medium: watercolor on cold-pressed archival paper
Nov-Dec 2015
* all are available as art prints in my online store

Project: Esquire Philippines’ Eraserheads 2-track Album
Tasks: Cover concept and graphic design
Date of publication: September 1, 2014
Client: Erwin Romulo, Editor in Chief of Esquire Philippines

I’m very sure that eeryone who grew up listening to the Eraserheads’ music in the ’90s missed the band sorely since their breakup in 2001. I was among those fans so when our good friend Erwin Romulo, EIC of Esquire Philippines called me up in April of 2014 to let me know that they were coming up with two new tracks as a group again exclusively for Esquire, I was ecstatic. What made it even sweeter was that I was going to design the album sleeve. I’ve had a lot of experience working with the band, as detailed in this ultraelectromagneticjourney post, but this time was different. They all had solo projects now and they had different ideas of what they liked. With that in mind, I holed up in our home office for two days and churned out dozens of album cover studies as quickly as I could. I posted some of those studies on Instagram (click to see the comments) and here they are again below.

They all ended up liking the discreet inverted E formed by color blocks, with one color to represent each of them.

And I was right about fans missing their music. 30,000 copies of the magazine’s September issue sold out on the first weekend of release.

* You can read more about the #EsquireEheads mania in this Adobo Magazine feature.

( I also answereed a few questions about the project for Rappler in this feature: Behind the Scenes Notes on New Eraserheads Songs.

Project: “Waltz This Knee” – cover design for a fictitious Eraserheads album to accompany a short story by Aldus Santos in Uno Magazine
Tasks: illustration
Date of publication: April 2010
Client: Erwin Romulo, then-Editor of Uno Magazine

Much of my music packaging design career is defined by the work I did in the mid-to-late-’90s for Filipino rock band Eraserheads. (You can read about that ultraelectromagneticjourney here).

When Uno Magazine was planning a “Fiction” issue, Erwin and the editors conjured up the idea that maybe there was a never-released Eraserheads album so he tasked rock journalist Aldus Santos to write the piece, bits of which I typed down in this post in 2010. I was asked to provide the cover illustration and, basing it on the song titles which all sounded rustic and very local to me, I came up with a design that I thought reflected the mood of the album.