Toxaemia – Rejected Souls of Kerberus

Wrestling the guardian of the underworld – one of my most challenging projects this year.

Back in February, Pontus Cervin of Toxaemia contacted me to ask if I wanted to work with them for their upcoming release, I happily accepted, and started sketching almost right away. I quickly found out that it was going to be quite the challenge to find an interesting and original way to portray Cerberus, the guardian dog of the underworld in Greek Mythology.

Listen to Toxaemia on Spotify while you read!

Background:
Toxaemia is a Swedish Death Metal band who originally released some music back in 1990-1991, and made a comeback in 2020 with the album “Where Paths Divide”.

Creative Process:
They gave me a short brief and some background on the concept of the album, so I went straight to work, coming up with some sketches for the new album, titled “Rejected Souls of Kerberus”. Obvious choices were to include Cerberus as well as the souls, but I wasn’t sure at all how they should interact with eachother – if at all. One of my favourite ideas was Kerberus “rejecting” the souls by spewing them into an abyss of sorts, straight from its own mouths.

After doing some sketches I figured I was ready to head into Photoshop and start developing the illustration. I couldn’t have been more wrong. I wrangled the composition, trying to find something that felt right, and it took a while. Here are some examples of the scrapped ideas. The last sketch of these four was for a second illustration, which we eventually scrapped, but I really did like the mood of it. I might finish it eventually.

I tried some different concepts, one of them was a more aggressive Cerberus, but that felt a bit out of line with the concept of the album, so we went with more of a guarding, watchful, Cerberus.

When we finally landed on a concept and a good composition it was a pretty straightforward process, going from sketch to the final artwork.

One major change was when I found some awesome demonic concept art from an artist called Batuhan Titiz. So I tried my best to kind of integrate his style a little bit into Cerberus. It’s not super similar but it kind of helped me go in the direction of something that felt a bit more otherwordly than before.

I ended up adding quite a bit of detail to the image, and some extra elements that somewhat altered the feel and composition, specifically the open “grave” thingy in the middle. I added that part since I felt the walkway of the souls was unnatural unless they had an object or something in the environment that they had to go around. The guys liked it and so we kept it in.

Here’s the final artwork:

Some comments from the band on the finished artwork!

My biggest takeaway from this project was that it is incredibly important to develop the concept and the composition in the sketching stage, until you´re really happy with it. Only then should you progress and spend any amount of time on rendering.

Also, I can spend pretty much an infinite amount of time just refining and adding detail. Knowing when to stop is a skill in and of itself. To know when the illustration is so much finished that adding any extra doesn’t make the image better, it just changes it without improving it.

If you read the blog post and checked out the videos, please comment with any questions or feedback, it would be super helpful! See you next time!

Bonus: Here’s the full width artwork.