BENJAMIN MARRA

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.

Drawings inspired by RPG adventures.

T-shirt designs for the thrash-metal band Violator.

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

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.

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

An illustration in Inc. Magazine for an article about Fan Fest events based on the TV show, The Walking Dead.

Cover artwork for the Czarface album A Fistful of Peril.

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.

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.

A series of illustrations for the amazing story of Panther Girl for Victory Journal.

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

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

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.

Illustration Body Double screening poster.

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

Accompanying a review of Randy Kennedy’s novel Presidio in The New York Times Book Review.

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

DVD box cover art for Takeshi Kitano’s Violent Cop.

Cover art for the free comics newspaper Secret Prison.