Eddie The Head

I’m a fan of the music of the english band Iron Maiden. As a child, I used to stare at the band’s album covers in record stores. That’s how in the late 80s, Derek Riggs‘ art made me start listening to Iron Maiden, and his art became one of my most important artistic influences.

Back in 2006, I started with the idea of ​​creating this series of illustrations called “Zombie-Nation“. I need to include a version of this character Eddie The Head in it, and at the end of past year I started the artistic exercise of composing the artwork as a tribute.

This fanart had to be solid. A tribute so well done that any fan of the band, including me, would definitely want to wear a t-shirt with this design on it.

I decided to listen to the band’s first albums as part of the creative process, and that was where I got the final concept: Make an Eddie that had totally iconic elements from the covers of the first and most emblematic Iron Maiden albums.

That’s why I created this tribute with a fairly well-dosed collage, including easter eggs that any fan of the band will recognize.

The graphic process starts – like all my work – from a pencil sketch to define the composition well, then inking and finally the finishing and coloring I do digitally in a vector illustration from pencil sketch, using Adobe Illustrator and just a mouse-click to draw.

UPDATE (Nov 2014): I decided to invest in a campaign for sharing my art in free-to-grab postcards!

UPDATE (Dec 2020): I made a 5-color special screen-printed edition of my artwork, to be released in a small run of 25 t-shirts (5 t-shirts per size) just for me and my friends!