Ali Condon
The artist who created the cover for Tyler, The Creator's Igor vinyl cover has revealed how much he got paid for the piece - and some people think it should have been a lot more.
Lewis Rossignol, an artist and illustrator from Maine, US, was approached by Tyler himself to design the cover art after catching the rapper's eye with his impressive work.
Hoping to inspire other artists looking to make a living with their work, Lewis took to TikTok to reveal how much money he earned for the impressive piece.
Before revealing the price, he explained: "I've done more than this album cover, but this is the biggest one I've ever done."
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The artist went on to explain that there were two different ways to go about charging someone for a commission.
"It really kind of depends on if you want to just sell the rights to the record label so they own the art and they can do whatever they want with it, or, for instance, in this case, I didn't want to do that. I wanted the ability to sell prints of this myself.
"So they used the art for the album cover, I can still sell prints. So, I was ok with letting the art go to them for a lesser value because I knew I'd sell a lot of prints. So I got a $5,000 cheque from Columbia Records."
He went on to clarify that, because he decided to keep the rights to the artwork, he did manage to make 'a lot more than that' just selling prints.
Reacting to Lewis' tell-all, some people had a fairly mixed response.
"$5000 seems criminally low", complained one viewer.
Meanwhile, another, more impressed TikToker wrote: "5k??? I've been doing them for $150."
Responding to the disappointed users, Lewis assured them that he made more than enough cash off his piece.
"Should’ve been more in my opinion", read one comment. "You’ve made the face of the album", to which Lewis replied: "I probably could have got 10k but not retaining the rights."
When another person told him: "bestie you needed an extra 0...", Lewis wrote back: "Record labels will never pay that. Thats why I kept the rights so I could add the extra zero myself."
Sounds like Lewis has nothing to worry about!
In a follow-up video, the artist left followers even more speechless when he confessed that he almost missed the chance to work with Tyler, The Creator entirely, after accidentally ghosting him.
After leaving the Grammy Award winning artist on delivered for four months, Lewis 'finally saw the message' and got back to him right away, narrowly missing out on the major commission altogether!
UNILAD has reached out to a representative for Tyler, The Creator and Columbia Records for a comment.
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