Moonshine Bandits - Confessions of an Outlaw Album Art

Moonshine Bandits – Confessions of an Outlaw

Surreal 3D Illustration Album ART & Digipak Packaging Design

Character model and scene created in 3D. Texturing and digital painting in Photoshop.

When Moonshine Bandits approached me for the CD cover artwork of their 11th album, Confessions of an Outlaw, they asked for a bold shift — something raw, iconic, and reflective of their new, more mature sound.
This outlaw culture-inspired album cover art had to feel like a battle between sin and salvation, a hymn for outlaws looking for a little redemption.

The result is a 3D illustration showing a surreal portrait that toes the line between sinner and saint.
Built first in 3D and then brought to life with digital painting and photo textures in Photoshop, this album art features a cracked, statuesque figure — a modern outlaw with a heavy crown of shards while his head disintegrates, half-angel, half-wreck. His chest is emblazoned with the Moonshine Bandits name, inked across wings and a cross, making the band itself part of the character’s flesh and mythos.

The outlaw sits slouched among an open diary and scattered confessions, while whiskey spills from a Bucked Up bottle – I had this idea of having a product placement, as Moonshine Bandits manufacture their own whiskey brand. The diary clutched at his lap carries the album’s title, subtly woven into the world.  Around him, the background thrums with an ornate yet broken stained glass and a pulsing halo of blue light coming from the Moon, creating the main sinner and saint dichotomy on the cover art— a nod to religious iconography, but spun with grit and rebellion.

Beyond the album art itself, I also designed the full 3-panel digipak packaging, ensuring the aesthetic extends through the inside artwork and tray designs, wrapping the physical experience in the same emotional narrative as the music. The tattoos were designed hand drawn from scratch, creating custom art to match the themes of loyalty, outlaw culture and reckoning that run through the album’s tracks.

Technically, this CD cover artwork was a hybrid creation: the figure sculpted and lit in 3D for dramatic realism, then painstakingly enhanced with digital brushwork to achieve a more painterly, gritty finish.
I wanted every crack, every inked line, every spill of bourbon to tell its own little story — the kind you only notice after staring into the album art while the music pounds in the background.

This project blends surreal artwork, 3D illustration, and classic digital painting into a surreal narrative portrait, designed to grow roots in the listener’s imagination from the first glance.