BENJAMIN MARRA

A cover painting I did for the Old School Essentials TTRPG rulebook, The Demonic Grimoire. 18×24, oil on hardboard.

Painted for Necrotic Gnome, the publisher of the seminal TTRPG, Old School Essentials. Available for purchase on Exalted Funeral’s website. Original art: 60×18, acrylic on canvas.

A cover painting for a DCC RPG adventure module, The 10th Doomstar, put out by Dragon Peak Publishing. 16×20. Oil on Ampersand cradled hardboard.

I've always loved the genre of Sword & Sorcery. 15x20. Acrylic on illustration board.

Personal piece. A possible book cover for Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Vintage pulp science-fiction book cover was what we were going for with this one. The art director already worked out a sketch on which I based the image’s composition. I used Photoshop to “paint” it. Working with a huge array of digital brushes was a lot of fun.

Digital painting in Photoshop for The New York Times Opinion piece responding to new studies on male loneliness in America.

Personal piece. An illustration from an RPG session.

Personal piece.

In 2016 I provided the cover art and some interior illustrations for American Illustration 35.

This album art was nominated for a Grammy Award in 2017. The record label Numero Group invited me to create the art for this collection of Sabbath-inspired songs from obscure Heavy Metal bands in the 70s. I created the cover art as well as the interior gatefold illustration and booklet cover. We went for a black-light poster art style, using the subject matter of a post-Manson counter culture world where drug experimentation and free love had lost their life-affirming message and were replaced by abuse, crime, violence, and death, against the backdrop of an ever-present nuclear annihilation threat.

The cover for The New York Times Magazine issue devoted to California. We created a scene of all the things California faces in its future.

The art director and I enjoyed this collaboration but the artist whose album this was for rejected the art, unfortunately.

Drawings inspired by RPG adventures.

An attempt at the impossible task of illustrating Conan’s God, Crom.

A Robocop and Showgirls mashup piece for a Paul Verhoeven themed exhibit.

An illustration for a limited-edition print of the classic video game, Street Fighter 2.

Cover artwork for Lil B’s 6 Kiss

Poster artwork for the engineering team 13 Detroit competing in Red Bull Creation.

Cover artwork for the Czarface album A Fistful of Peril.

Album cover art for Bricc Baby Shitro’s Nasty Dealer.

Cover art for Bricc Baby Shitro’s Nasty Dealer 2.

An illustration of rapper Mikel Knight for Gawker.com.

Cover art for the rapper Lil B’s legendary album Black Ken.

Wu-Tang Clan pinup for Ed Piskor’s Hip Hop Family Tree.

Cover art for Madlib’s Medicine Show: The History of the Loop Digga.

Poster artwork for the band The Black Seeds for the Rock en Seine music festival.

A digital painting for the cover of The Naked Heroes’s album Demon the Whiskey Down.

A series of posters for the Red Bull Music Academy festival.