Cover Art that Never Was

+ A Newsletter only Giveaway

Welcome back to the Flowering Jungle! Thanks so much for your responses to my “One Year in the Flowering Jungle” newsletter last month. It’s been great to hear from so many of you. I always love reading the comments that come in and I appreciate you!

I have a cool newsletter for this month including a subscriber only giveaway and some never before seen artwork.

Vinyl Giveaway

As a thank you to all my newsletter subscribers I wanted to do a Flowering Jungle only giveaway! Leave a comment below or reply to this email with your favorite animal to be entered to receive original vinyl pressings of both Adventures on the Floating Island and Flowering Jungle vinyl from my personal collection. The winner will be notified via email next week.

I’ll be sharing everyone’s favorite animals on my stories on Instagram too, so be sure to keep an eye out for that.

I’ll start with my favorite animal, the Spectacled Owl 👀

Cover Art that Never Was

I thought for March it might be fun to show you a little BTS of all the cover art I’ve never used. Since Monster Rally first started in 2010, I’ve come out with 8 full length albums, several EPs and a few collaborative records. For each one I typically make a few iterations of cover / jacket artwork and narrow it down to my favorite. The rest, sadly, goes unused and usually sits in my studio. Today I wanted to shine a light on those long-forgotten pieces and show you a little of how the final versions were chosen along the way.

Botanica Dream

I tried a lot of different directions for this album, check out some of my concepts below and the final artwork above.

Adventures on the Floating Island

Most of the final artwork for this record came from a book I released with the Mystery Cove album that had 25 different LP covers in it. This was one of them. Give me a shout if you have one of the books or even are the proud owner of the test pressing that has this artwork on it.

I had a few ideas for artwork for this records and the Sister Owls single that I didn’t end up using. Should out to Alexander Barrett for the awesome custom lettering for the album!

Flowering Jungle

I was pretty set on using the below cover for Flowering Jungle, but Hunter from Gold Robot encouraged me to move a bit out of my comfort zone. I ended up with the color wave concept above as the final and it is one of my favorite album covers.

Mystery Cove

I really love this cover art. I had tried a few different things before I landed on the final. You can see them below along with some more lettering from Alexander Barrett.

Return to Paradise

It was around the time that I was making the artwork for this album that I started to dive deep into botanical elements in my work, and I haven’t looked back. Check out some of the unused concepts below.

Funny enough, I was working on artwork for RUMTUM’s Mystic Wonders LP around the same time as Return to Paradise and he almost got the final cover art for himself:

The final artwork I did for this album is one of my favorites though:

Foreign Pedestrians - Monster Rally and Jay Stone

I was psyched to create this album with Jay and I tried a few different styles for the cover art, see below. We ended up going with the above with a theme of some kid pictures of me and him.

Thanks for taking the time to check these out! It’s been fun to go back through them.

Don’t Forget about the Giveaway!

Don’t forget to comment below or reply to this email with you favorite animal to enter the vinyl giveaway!

Thanks again for reading! If you’re a paid subscriber, keep an eye out for a second email tomorrow with your playlist and wallpaper artwork.

See you next month in the Flowering Jungle!

-Ted