Monday, April 18, 2011

The Frakkin Toasters

In honor of my shirt sale at Teefury , I have created another image in a similar style to the River Tam and the Fireflies piece. This time however I set my sights on one of my other favorite Sci-fi series in recent years, Battlestar Galactica.

I had so much fun trying to work Battlestar into an album cover, but there were so many characters... and they're ALL awesome!



I wasn't sure which direction to take it at first, so I started with a name. I had thought of a few that weren't quite working for me, and when I wrote down "The Frakkin Toasters" I knew I'd found my direction.

Of course it's a sorta punk-new wave-metal band. I imagined they would sound something like "The Network" but instead of Billie Joe's vocals (you're not fooling anyone Green Day) Caprica 6 would handle lead singer duties. And as much as I loved the Centurions from the rebooted BSG, I still feel the Original Cylons are much more iconic.



Once I had the band name and the album cover sketched out, I needed a catchy title. Since it was a cylon themed image, it was pretty clear what the album should be:


Here is the album cover:


I love doing all of the design work, but I also really enjoy coming up with songs that would be on an album such as this. It wasn't until I started doing some research for song titles did I find out that Caprica 6 has a phrase that she repeats multiple times throughout the series. When she meets a human for the first time, she asked them, "Are you alive?" which in both deep and awesome, so that's definitely the song to open the record with. I also learned that the term "CYLON" was an acronym created for the re-booted series, and if there's one thing I love, it's acronyms! The 5th song on the album is called "The Final 5" for pretty obvious reasons. As for the rest, they're pretty straight forward. Okay... maybe not, "End of line" is awesome because I look at is like a Tron reference, but it's also often spoken by the Hybrids in the weird Cylon bathtub. I thought about including the song title "All Along the Watchtower" but that song really pulled me out of the fictional world on the show, so I decided against it.



I'm hoping that Teefury will turn the design into a shirt. I've submitted it, but have yet to hear back from them, so if you happen to come across this site, feel free to visit http://www.teefury.com and send them a friendly message of what you'd like to see. Also, as always, prints are available on my Etsy store, just click here :)

Live long and prosper... oh wait, wrong show.
-Joey

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