Behind The Artworks: Mondo Podre - Necronomía De Subexistencia (2022)

Espasa: We were considering various ideas with cyberpunk imaginery in common and ended up settling for the concept of a cyborg/robot meditating in oneness with a pile of man-made crap of dystopic proportions. We contacted our dearest friend Irene (@arserinyos) for the task because she’d probably understand what we were going for and nobody in the band has any talent for graphic design.

Irene: When contacted by my family friends from Mondo Podre, I just couldn’t say no to this endeavour. The first step was to fully understand what they had in mind for this project, so I spent some time talking with the guys to wrap my head around the very concept of the artwork. We basically sat down and spoke about references, the style they pictured for the album cover and we discussed something which I think not many people take into account, and that is the colour palette for the entire project. We even had a grid with different colours in order for them to pick the ones they thought combined better with their concept.

Espasa: We considered a more “vaporwave” aesthetic in the beginning but, since the artwork was going to be traditional art instead of digital, we agreed on a blue/grey colour palette because we thought it fitted the general theme and the dark futuristic vibe we were looking for.

Irene: As Espasa mentioned, I decided to go full Luddite and opted for traditional art. I used a mixed technique of markers, watercolour, fineliners, gouache even... To give the artwork a manga/comic book feel to it. I did a final digital retouch to mostly correct some colour loss that happened when digitising the image and give some final touches, but it was 95% traditional art. I'm lucky to share a lot of references with Mondo Podre, so intercomprehension was a given from the very beginning. Once the concept and the colour scheme were decided, they gave me free rein to execute it however I wanted, so I could basically express myself without any restraint -hence the bunch of Easter Eggs I planted here and there-, and it was lovely. You cannot possibly fathom the amount of images of e-waste dumpsters I browsed, as well as traditional sci-fi manga (namely Ghost in the Shell and Battle Angel Alita) and religious imagery (i.e. the Karni Mata "Temple of the rats" in Rajasthan). It was definitely a dystopic clusterfuck of references.