2010

LEVEL 4 = Kung Fu Cowboy
PART 1: King Solomon's Temple

Classic Rock
Pop Music
Rock Music

Photography by The Hippy Coyote:   
This is one of my last 35mm photoshoots. Using my Nikon and movie lighting equipment I set up a black background and shot this the first year I was in Utah.

The Levis jacket has a TAI MANTIS patch on it. This was before I created Shaolin Chi Mantis.

Prepress by The Hippy Coyote:
I scanned the 35mm negs at 1800dpi.

Editing was done in Photoshop.

The album cover graphic arts were created using Quark.

The first batch of 20 CDs was created so I could get the album on iTUNES and elsewhere. These first 20 cds were so much work that I autographed them and signed them with numbers 1 of 20, 2 of 20...

I glued the front and back covers together, because I couldn't print 2-sided on my home printer. The CDs were printed by FedEx and then I burned the music on them.

Fast enough.

Created and edited at 300dpi.

I am still getting uneven shadows by combining two layers of fonts. From now on I will make my fancy graphics in Photoshop.

PDF DOWNLOADS
King Solomon's Temple
ALBUM COVER
and CD Artworks 2010

If you purchased your album online, you may not have received artwork with it.

When you purchase your album downloads from Shaolin Records, we included the ENTIRE LEVEL 4 Part 1 website of americanZEN.org   We also threw in some extra photos of Coyote and webpages of some websites of Coyote...

Sorry, I've got to get better at lining up the crosshairs for the front and back covers.

Download KFC Part 1 CD foldout OUTSIDE COVER

Download KFC Part 1 CD foldout INSIDE COVER

Download KFC Part 1 CD Label Imprint

Download KFC Part 1 CD TRAY CARD

2009

Tai Chi Magic 1

World Beat Music
Meditation Music
Chinese Folk Music

Photography by The Hippy Coyote:   
I had at least four of my Kung Fu students helping with this shoot. I was fresh from making Hollywood movies at Paramount Studios and 20th Century Fox, and producing music videos for REO Speedwagon, MTV, Smokey Robinson, Stanley Clarke, and 7-Up commercials...so I expected everything to run like a Hollywood movie set.

I got permission from the owners of this Mormon theme park, Gil Gal Gardens, to shoot there. It was a wonderful place to shoot. Nice vibe. All my photography up to 1999 was 35mm with my Nikon Nikkormat from my uncle, Dr. Richard E. Warner.

Prepress by The Hippy Coyote:
Using black and white film, probably Ilford 50, I created the duotones and masking around the perimeter in Adobe Photoshop CS2.

I like that green color I came up with. I try to work in CMYK colors so we can print what we see...

As with the American Zen album covers, I try to put as much information as possible YET not ruin the cover art. I hope you like my green font on the green tint...

Fast enough.

My printer wants everything at 300dpi, so I save a little processing power by not editing in 600dpi or 1200dpi.

I am so disappointed with the way it is handling my font shadows. At 300dpi, I am getting uneven shadows from staggering fonts to create shadows or highlights...

Perhaps the font size is the problem? What is the smallest font that will reproduce with a font shadow created by duplicate font behind it?

PDF DOWNLOADS
Tai Chi Magic 1
ALBUM COVER
and CD Artworks 2009

If you purchased your album online, you may not have received artwork with it.

When you purchase your album downloads from Shaolin Records, we often include album cover graphics, extra photos and webpages of interest to you, with the album or book you purchase from us online.

Download Tai Chi Magic 1 CD foldout OUTSIDE COVER

Download Tai Chi Magic 1 CD foldout INSIDE COVER

Download Tai Chi Magic 1 CD Label Imprint

Download Tai Chi Magic 1 CD TRAY CARD

2008

LEVEL 3 = I Want You To Love Me

Album Download
Buy Now = Download Now
Using PayPal.com

This photoshoot was shot in the Hollywood Hills by Nancy Vollrath. It was fun and we as a band were obviously comfortable together.

Although John Merrit and Bob had played together in Mark Paladino's band, you can see by the photos that I'm the one holding everyone together.

This is a duotone kinda thing. The cover went through many variations and the fonts also. The original covers had no shadows on fonts.

Free
PDF DOWNLOADS
of
ALBUM COVER ARTWORK

If you purchased your album online, you may not have received artwork with it.

When you purchase your album downloads from Shaolin Records, we often include album cover graphics, extra photos and webpages of interest to you.

PDF Free Download
  Download L3 CD foldout OUTSIDE COVER

PDF Free Download
  Download L3 CD foldout INSIDE COVER

PDF Free Download
  Download L3 CD LABEL

PDF Free Download
  Download L3 CD TRAY CARD

2007

LEVEL 2 = Christ Killer

Album Download
Buy Now = Download Now
Using PayPal.com

This photoshoot was done for the rock opera of mine, "Coyote In A Graveyard." Yep, that's the one. I got my Coyote name performing that rock opera with Michael J. Fox back in 1986. I had put down my Jethro Tull flute for the eighties. Like the trombone of my childhood, even my kick-ass flute style wasn't allowed in punk rock, or the power pop of my band, THE RICH, living in Venice Beach and Santa Monica...

I was goofing around in Adobe Photoshop, as I am prone to do, and tortured this 35mm photo into the wild pink you see here. It probably won't print as brightly as I'd like. It really attacks you from my iMac monitor!

The solarization technique creates weird artifacts so I touched up the image to look better in this psychedelic reality of mine.

NOTE: Some of the earliest posted web images do not include the touchups on the album cover so my mouth looks bigger and clownish.   Coyote />

There are more bugs in Quark than Tom's pot plants. What a hastle! Anytime I used many of the new cool features in Quark I had to remove them when I discovered the text box outlines and so I had to make my text shadows using duplicated fonts stacked and staggered.

It took 6 weeks again to make this happen. My friend Jeff, advised me to use Adobe Illustrator to create FONT OUTLINES so that I wouldn't have to use any fonts at all.

On one of the versions I attempted this but the results still had problems... and in the end, the "ripper" the guy who takes the digtal art and creates the film or digital file whatever it is nowadays, but this is the last step before the ink hits the paper or the CD label.

The "ripper" kept having problems with my fonts and the screen fonts for them working correctly even though we could print PDFs and digital proofs... so he took my fonts into Macintosh Classic OS9 and stuck the screen fonts and font outlines into one folder then used this new font folder file... which worked fine.

Unfortunately, I got hit with a $50 fee for this -- even though it should have worked fine without these extra steps...

Oh well. Printing seems to be a nightmare. All the people who do printing on a daily basis seem to expect everything to always go wrong.

Warning: Do not use the text shadow features in Quark. Don't use the...

Free
PDF DOWNLOADS
of
ALBUM COVER ARTWORK

If you purchased your album online, you may not have received artwork with it.

When you purchase your album downloads from Shaolin Records, we often include album cover graphics, extra photos and webpages of interest to you.

Download L2 CD foldout OUTSIDE COVER

Download L2 CD foldout INSIDE COVER

Download L2 CD LABEL

Download L2 CD TRAY CARD

2005

LEVEL 1 = Peace Of Mind

CD Cover
CD Label (2-color silkscreen
   on WHITE Full Flood CD)
CD Inlay Tray Card

Photography by Ed Animal:   
Animal and I were both photographers for the Los Angeles newspapers before I left for Utah. He shot two concerts of my band and a solo gig. The other was at Club Lingerie in Hollywood with Ian Astbury of The Cult cheering me on, "COY-O-TE!"

Prepress by The Hippy Coyote:
The inside shot is from the same concert. I love Black and White photography. I borrowed the negatives from Ed Animal and used his darkroom to print up these photos on 8x10 cloth paper stock. I got into cloth photography paper when I started hand coloring my photos. The cloth paper is like a painter's canvas.

I use Marshall's oil paints. I made my own brushes with Q-tips and applied layers to create tones and shadow. I'd have Alan's Custom Photo Lab print my cloth prints light so that the picture was more like a color-by-numbers project.

These Black and White photos were retouched by me, long before I ever had a computer. I did it these B/W prints the old-fashioned way with traditional black retouching watercolors.

With my computer, I could have easily removed the hair from my face and the sweat in my armpit -- but I do enjoy the reality of reality.

I spent more than 6 weeks bouncing graphics back and forth to the printer before I figured this program out.

Free
PDF DOWNLOADS
of
ALBUM COVER ARTWORK

If you purchased your album online, you may not have received artwork with it.

When you purchase your album downloads from Shaolin Records, we often include album cover graphics, extra photos and webpages of interest to you.

Download L1 CD OUTSIDE COVER

Download L1 CD LABEL

Download L1 CD TRAY CARD