Losing Nick Lay has been an emotional event for us and it seems weird to be posting something here about searching for a new artist. The “business side” of this hasn't really reared its ugly head until now, but as I project the time lag between starting a search for an artist, and having one actually working with us, I see a worry that we might have a new show ready before we have an artist to do the cover art for it. So I am trying to prod my rear end a little and move on this even though I am not ready to.

First off, this is not some “cattle call” for potential artists. My wife made a good point to me after I had been perusing freelance artist websites for many hours. She told me that the likely right fit for us was an artist who already likes and appreciates what we do. Who “gets” our work. Hopefully someone who doesn't need to start at ground zero on figuring out stuff like that. That makes sense to me. So let's start our search with our own clan and expand it from there if need be.

In plain English here's what we need:

A (human! No AI generated art) work-for-hire artist who will make everything we do look better. The website, branding, merch, etc.

One who can also do our cover art for the individual big HH shows. You can go to our website and see the level of artistic expertise involved. While not requiring that anyone copy the previous artist's style/approach, we would want someone who had a variety of looks/styles they could employ. We like to creatively switch things up. We are trying to look at this the same way we would if our favorite comic book title changed artists. It won't be the same look exactly but it should be high level stuff work, just as it was with Nick.

The bad news is:

1. I interfere a lot. I like to give the artist a lot of leeway in coming up with interesting stuff. You get the best results that way. BUT, the artist's art is being forever linked with my own creative work and I am a pain in the rear about my own material...so the artist unfortunately gets trapped in my persnickety vortex I'm afraid.

2. We own the artwork produced.

So, maybe this sounds good, maybe it doesn't. Nick was with us for 18 years, so hopefully that's a sign that we're pretty decent people to work with.

There are also some tech requirements that other people gave me that I have cut-and-pasted here:

“Someone proficient in adobe illustrator to create what we call ‘Album (cover)Art’ for each finished hardcore history show/title/series part/episode/audio file we release.  We also need a website designer for ux/ui improvements on our platform. This includes being able to use adobe XD and or Figma to send mock ups and website graphics to us and web developers.”

If this sounds good to you send a link (or whatever) to some examples of what you do that we can check out. You can email them here: I promise to check them all out personally. A thousand thanks!

-Dan