Black Rose Preliminary artworks

Here are a few of the preliminary sketches for my design for the Black Rose album.
As is usual with any design there is a directional brief from the band and the record company but in this instance, I only had to deal with Philip himself, solo.

As we knew each other well at this point and he was used to seeing very rough ideas, he was, as he said himself, well able to read my sketches and ideas even from a quick pencil doodle or a description over a crackly phone line. Yep, lo-tech days where a telephone call to London cost an arm and a leg.

Nothing complicated

In this case, he was keen on the idea of a quasi-realistic approach to the album cover.
’Nothing too complicated’ said Philip… famous last words.
This artwork was to be as complicated as it gets.

The actual idea from Philip of a realistic ‘Black Rose’ did present a damn problem.
Thin Lizzy had a top London photographer try to photograph a black rose for a single from the album so a beautiful red rose was sprayed black, wilted as it was being photographed and that was that. The single cover appeared ok but the rose looked dead as doornails.

Meanwhile, I was trying a few ideas out myself including photographing real roses and trying to dye colour into the black and white images. They looked ok but had no life or feeling to them.

The Preliminary Artworks

There are a few more still to be found but these are the ones I have dug out so far:

01. A very basic black rose sketch from a real live rose. It still looked dead.

02. Philip suggested a sexy kind of cover in a conversation in the Bailey pub in Dublin one day and this was my take on it. I imagined the Black Rose as a tattoo on a beautiful woman but it was, even then, a bit sexist and a little over the top, maybe even too macho. I did a colour version of this also, still up there somewhere in the attic…

03. A very rough cover composition with a florid Elizabethan style letterform added.

04. Another compositional doodle. Getting close to an idea of how the cover would look.

05. Finally, I went for it and drew this gorgeous black rose in pencil and when it was done after a few false starts I knew it would work for the cover so off it went to Philip and a few days later I got the go-ahead in a phone call from Philip in London.
‘Love it, Jimmie, go for it’.

06. The final pencil artwork for the album cover with the cover lettering included.

07. I’m missing this one as well. The actual pencil drawing for the Black Rose logo is not lost, just buried somewhere in the files upstairs.

08. The pen and ink final art for the Black Rose lettering. I love this very Elizabethan manner of script and studied the great typographer Herb Lubalin and his version of it, so mine was derived from that one. I have the reference somewhere too. It was, if I remember correctly, in his beautiful magazine from the late 60s called ‘AvantGarde’. Have to root through my copies…

09. The final and very detailed pencil drawing for the Black Rose was photographed, then traced and redrawn on the actual artwork then airbrushed and painted over in transparent inks to allow the pencil lines to shine through. The background took forever, with layer after layer of transparent blue built up over days and each layer dried and fixed with spray.
To this day my daughter, Suzanne reminds me that despite wearing a surgical mask for protection my nose was bright blue for days after.

10. The finished album cover with the addition of the painted leaching blood after I felt it needed a little more than to be just a weird botanical artwork.
This beautiful idea came to me just as I thought it was all done and dusted and ready to be flown over to the UK for reproduction.

I See His Blood Upon The Rose

I remembered an old poem from my school days, one that Philip was well familiar with, called ‘I See His Blood Upon The Rose’. I called him, he loved the idea and I told him I needed another day to finish but there was no time left so I worked overnight and by morning it was ready to be collected and off it went to the management company.

The ‘blood on the rose’ idea was inspired by the poem by 1916 Easter Rising leader Joseph Mary Plunkett who was executed by a British firing squad after the crushing of the rebellion. His poem, ‘I see His Blood Upon The Rose’ was a poem in the mystical tradition expressing the intensity of the faith of the poet and rebel.

Then it was perfect and even today I’m still very proud of this iconic piece of album art, all thanks to my great friend and ally, Philip Lynott and all the wonderful guys in the band at the time: Brian, Scott and Gary and of course, the two guys who ran the whole show, Chris Morrison and Chris O’Donnell.
Yep, Philip really, really loved this one -and the rest is rock history 🙂