In April 1937 a photographer walked beside Joseph Stalin along the embankment of the new Moscow Canal and caught him with three companions, the water flat and bright behind them. The small man in the uniform at the leader's side, head of the secret police, was Nikolai Yezhov. Arrested in 1939 and shot in February 1940, he was scrubbed off the print by a retoucher working with a fine jet of paint and compressed air, and the canal was sprayed back in across the place where he had walked, so smoothly that the water looks as if it had always been there.
That is the tool heavy metal borrowed for its fantasies. An airbrush removes the one thing every other painting tool leaves behind, the mark of the hand: no bristle, no ridge of oil, no pencil line, only colour settling out of the air in a mist so fine that the surface seems to give off its own light. Airbrush metal album covers turned that eraser around and sprayed monsters, chrome and warriors onto the board with the same missing maker, so that a dragon looked less painted than photographed on some other planet.
The painted sleeve as a whole, the oils of Frazetta and Ken Kelly and the demons on Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, belongs to the earlier chapter. The airbrush had a shorter career than the brush, and a louder one. Ten years of chrome, then silence.
How an airbrush builds a sleeve
Patented by Charles Burdick in 1892 and shown to the public by the Chicago art suppliers Thayer and Chandler at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, the modern airbrush is a pen with a needle inside it, where compressed air runs across the tip, drags paint off the needle and throws it forward as a cone of droplets too small to see. For half a century its best customer was the photographic retoucher. Sleeve art came later.
The method is masking and patience. The painter lays transparent film over the board, cuts the outline of one object with a scalpel, sprays through the hole, peels the film away and cuts the next, so that every edge on the finished picture is a blade edge and every curve between two edges is a gradient no brush could hold. Chrome is the showpiece. A dark band sprayed across a bright one reads as a horizon reflected in polished steel, and a pinpoint of pure white, the star highlight, goes onto every rounded surface last.
America supplied the hands. The custom van painters of the seventies laid airbrushed sunsets, wizards and dragons down the steel flanks of panel vans, turning a delivery truck into a gallery that rolled through town at forty miles an hour. The American edition of Heavy Metal, first dated April 1977, put fantasy painting on the newsstand every month.
| Year | Record | Painter | On the front |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1979 | Whitesnake, Lovehunter | Chris Achilleos | A woman astride a giant serpent |
| 1982 | Judas Priest, Screaming for Vengeance | Doug Johnson | The Hellion, a chrome bird of prey |
| 1982 | Diamond Head, Borrowed Time | Rodney Matthews | A swordsman before a dragon-headed fortress |
| 1984 | Judas Priest, Defenders of the Faith | Doug Johnson | The Metallian, a horned beast on tank tracks |
| 1988 | Judas Priest, Ram It Down | Mark Wilkinson | A metal fist smashing into the Earth |
Chrome for Judas Priest
The Toronto illustrator who gave Judas Priest a bird of prey made of polished metal was Doug Johnson, a fashion illustrator turned commercial painter who had shared a New York studio with Charles White III, one of the Californian airbrush men. His Hellion on Screaming for Vengeance in 1982, a steel eagle with its wings flung back and its beak wide open, came off the board gleaming like a showroom bumper, and the Metallian of Defenders of the Faith in 1984, horned and running on tank tracks, was sprayed in the same chrome.
Chrome on an airbrushed sleeve works like the mirage that lies across a motorway in a heatwave. A sheet of silver water floods the carriageway a mile ahead, bright enough to throw back the lorries, and a driver doing seventy stamps on the brake and swerves for a flood that was never there, because it is only sky bent back up off the hot road. The sprayed highlight promises the same depth of metal behind the glare. There is only paint behind it, and the eye goes on believing anyway.
There is only paint behind it, and the eye goes on believing anyway.
The painter who took over the chrome in 1988 and drove it straight through the planet was Mark Wilkinson, and on Ram It Down, released in May that year, a colossal metal fist comes down out of a blue storm and smashes into the Earth, sparks spraying off the impact and the crust beneath gone molten red. The title track fires at the speed of the picture, a salvo of a riff aimed at one spot and kept there. Subtlety was never on the invoice.
Airbrush metal album covers and the painted warrior
The Cyprus-born painter who made his name on finely airbrushed beauty, first on British paperbacks and then on the covers of Heavy Metal, was Chris Achilleos, and his sleeve for Lovehunter in 1979 set a naked woman astride a giant serpent, its scales sprayed one by one into a coil of green light. American distributors sold the record in a brown paper bag. Hard rock by trade, Whitesnake had handed the airbrush a scandal.
The cinema came calling next. For the animated feature Heavy Metal, released in August 1981, Achilleos painted the poster of Taarna, the silent warrior of the film's last story, riding her winged mount, and that image still fronts the film on its DVD releases. The film took its name from the magazine. The poster took its look from the airbrush.
An airbrush never touches the picture. That is why its best work looks found rather than made, and why its worst looks like nobody made it at all.
Declan Rourke, KaosMetal
The Somerset painter who turned a whole castle into the head of a beast for Diamond Head was Rodney Matthews, born in Paulton in 1945, and Borrowed Time, released by MCA on 15 October 1982, opened its gatefold on a cloaked swordsman, meant for Michael Moorcock's Elric, facing a stone fortress whose gate is a dragon's open jaw, a stair running down its tongue into fire. It was the most expensive sleeve MCA had commissioned at the time. The label paid for a record that looked like an epic before anyone heard it.
"In the Heat of the Night", the song that opens that record, went out as the band's sixth single and marches straight down the stair into the dragon's throat that the sleeve had opened. Matthews went on painting for Magnum through the eighties, and the dragons never left him.
The long silence after 1990
The computer finished what the compact disc had started. Within a decade of that first Photoshop, a gradient that had cost an illustrator a week of masking and spraying could be dragged across a screen in a second, and the chrome a painter had sweated over became a filter any designer in a record company basement could run before lunch. The hand airbrush went back into the drawer. The look lived on as a preset, and presets age badly.
What went missing was the evidence of labour. A sprayed Hellion carries hundreds of cuts in masking film that nobody sees and everybody senses, the way a riff carries the hours of the hand that plays it, and a filtered chrome carries none. The faithful noticed at once. The sharp edges and star highlights did not die with the sleeves, though, and the chromed lettering that still tops so many records, the name hammered into metal and polished until it flashes, is the heavy metal band logo, where the airbrush's last trick survives in daily use.
For twenty years this art was mocked as the look of a teenage bedroom wall, and on any honest reading the mockery missed what it was for. It was the only style in the history of the sleeve that made metal look machined rather than painted, which is exactly what the music on the other side of the cardboard was trying to sound like. The spray went quiet. The shine did not.
