Finished logoThe Yeehaa Boys are a five piece Country/Swing band consisting of Chris Fitz-Gibbon (Ted Mulry Gang) on lead vocals and guitar, Mark Lucas (The Radiators) on drums, Mick Buckley (The Mick Buckley Band) on piano, Artie Taylor(The Buddy Holly Show) on bass and Jordon on lead guitar.
For their debut Album cover they commissioned illustrator Theo Kats of T-Rex Art to re-create their last EP cover (also designed by T-Rex Art), this time featuring the members in Mad magazine style caricatures.
Pencil drawingFor this job Theo first started off with a pencil illustration depicting exaggerated facial features. The next step was to scan these illustrations and present them as separate files each file for each member. There is a wide range of styles one can pick from when it comes to caricatures. You can go hard with the accents and yield extremely funny results however the down side to this is when you are promoting a new and upcoming artist, you really want them as recognisable as possible. Extreme caricatures only work when the subject is widely known for their features and because of their celebrity status.
Original photoThat’s why I decided they should be mildly exaggerated in order to convey not only the humour behind this ‘bunch of larrikins’ but for them to be easily identified.
For this I started with a basic hand-drawn illustration which I then rendered with their own skin tones . These tones were sampled off a supplied photo. I then accented the features just enough to produce dimension and realism. Next I used the airbrush tool to smooth and enhance skin tones from dark to light. 
Final renderThe balance of light and dark were controlled by the use of Photoshop’s ‘Dodge’ tool. The lips and teeth were accented heavily as they add ‘life’ to the subject. Particularly teeth always look funnier when they are very white. Finally drop shadows were added behind the subjects for that extra bit of ‘lift’ off the page.
The Horse shoe was hand illustrated then scanned and ‘metalised’ in Adobe Photoshop. The Yeehaa logo was created by a slightly worked font and chromed with an Alien Skin plugin.
