Scenic artists are often known as the people who paint set elements such as backdrops, stage flooring as well as adding textures to all kinds of set pieces. But in today’s modern age of digital backdrops as well as band’s reverting to using album cover art behind them requires more than just the old palette and paintbrush. It requires digital skills, and the artistic skills to fill in the blanks. It takes a special type of artist that can take a square album cover from 1986 and turn it into a rectangular backdrop. That artist would be John Rios. PLSN checked in to see just where this artist falls into our business.
“I tell you, my job is strange. I have been totally swamped the last two weeks. Sometimes I think it’s like a conspiracy. I was slow all last month, and now I’ve been up until 3:30 in the morning every day hammering out designs and going back and forth with creatives on four different shows.”
This week, it’s Fleetwood Mac. Production designer Paul Normandale got his number through Sew What, a soft goods manufacturer heralded in the touring biz as one of the best.
“He has a terrific idea. His renderings for the set showed some sails and netting material that would live upstage, kind of surrounding and masking the centered video wall. Think of old rectangular looking sails from vessels used by the explorers.” Sew What is producing the fabric to make these looks and there are some basic renderings that Normandale’s camp produced in a PDF. But the idea is to make the sails look puffed out and full of wind. The production needed an artist that could figure out how to take a 2D flat canvas and make the sails look billowed.
“I drew up concepts and traded ideas back and forth with Paul,” Rios says. “We turned lines back and forth and messed with shadowing until we both felt it looked right.”
Once the artwork was agreed upon, Rios went back into his drawing tools of choice, Photoshop and Illustrator, to make sure the drawing would be perfectly rendered when they went to print the 70-foot-wide backdrop.
“The backdrop is actually two sets of fabric sails that are separated by about 10 feet. With a netting between them, it’s going to look cool.”
Midwest Roots
John Rios was born and raised in small town Michigan, where one was either a farmer or worked in the local factory. He has been drawing since he was a toddler and has never wanted to do anything else in life. He graduated school and did a four-year stint in the Marines before returning and hustling for any artwork he could get in Detroit. Then one day he heard Ted Nugent on the local radio and they were inviting people down to some function they were holding. “I thought to myself, heck, I’m gonna go meet Ted. I went down there and introduced myself as an artist. He was a nice guy and asked me to send him some stuff, images of my work. I did, and Ted called me two weeks later to tell me how much he loved my work and wanted to work with me. It was 1991. One image I did over several years of working with Ted was of him riding a flaming middle finger for a T-shirt. This image would later become my first backdrop. Sew What Inc. produced that for Ted, which is how I came to know them.
“A year later, Sew What called asking if I wanted to work with Mötley Crüe on Crüe Fest 2,” Rios continues, of the band’s second touring festival in 2009. “It was the 20th anniversary of Doctor Feelgood. The band wanted a 40-by-60-foot backdrop and an eight-by-40-foot (HxW) riser to stand behind them that looked like an insane asylum that had been closed for 20 years, then reopened. They wanted moldy walls, chipped paint and water on the floor. That was for one set where they played the entire album. They did a second set with all of their hits and asked for a second set of soft goods that had a Steampunk theme to it for that show.
“What I see lately is older bands heading on tour, and they want their artwork from early albums to appear behind them. Sometimes painted on fabric, printed on vinyl or digitally reproduced on a video wall. The problem is when the artists were drawing these covers all those years ago, nobody was keeping in mind that someone may wish to enlarge these images later. We cannot just take a camera and shoot the image and blow it up. That’s like taking a small 10kB image from your youth and trying to blow it up on your computer monitor as a 1MB image. It will look like mud and unrecognizable. That’s where I come in.
“Korn wanted me to recreate and slice up their album cover, Follow the Leader, so that most of the album appeared on a 16-by-32-foot (HxW) backdrop. Then they wanted the bottom parts to fill two riser skirts. Tying the whole stage together.” For this project, Rios had to redraw the entire cover from scratch. He must somehow stretch the image and expand on the theme of the original art, without making the skewed aspect ratio look different than the original. Not an easy task, but one that takes hours and hours.
“You gotta realize that in the old days, fans spent hours poring over album cover art while sitting in a room spinning vinyl. This art is sacred to them, and they will notice if something is wrong. One of the hardest things I ever had to do was an album cover for Death Cab for Cutie,” Rios says, describing their 2003 album, Transatlanticism. “They had a black crow with a twisted ball of yarn on an album cover. It was painstaking, getting every little strand of yarn to match the precise placement from the album cover. But I did it.”
A great part of his work is just setting up files so they are ready to print. On so many projects, Rios expands on his role and reminds himself that he’s not the one involved in the creative part of many projects. He’s the self-admitted cleanup guy. “I’ve often thought I should have a website that is called Unf*cker.com. Because I get calls all the time saying, ‘I’m f*cked. I don’t know if you can help me.’ I usually can. I un-f*ck problems, that’s what I do.”
Rios is known for his expertise in digital backdrops as well. One of his favorite clients is Alice Cooper, another Michigan native he’s done a lot of work for. “Alice is one client I’ve been able to be creative with, designing all the backdrop designs he’s used over the last four years and the ‘pink toy box’ design, working alongside David Davidian.” When Alice went out with the Hollywood Vampires [in 2015], he requested a bunch of different digital backdrops they could use during their shows this summer. He gave them options.
“This month, I got to work on a Nickelodeon show called Double Dare Live, a game show that was going out on the road in October with the same host and cast that are on TV. I did all the set renderings of what they would be touring with then did three 40-foot backdrops, table skirts and score boards for this tour,” Rios says, of the Oct.-Nov. 2018 trek reviving the classic game show on the live stage with original host Marc Summers and sidekick Robin Russo.
A Fan of the Bands
“What I really get off on is working for bands I idolized as a kid growing up in Michigan,” Kiss, Alice Cooper, Mötley Crüe, Fleetwood Mac — all of them. In 2011, I got a call from Joe over at Gallagher Staging. He said Kid Rock needed a big backdrop for his 40th birthday party at the football stadium.” So Rios designed that, which led to more work. “Joe called me and said Kid’s designer was in a pinch for some renderings on this artist that lived a few towns over from me. The next thing I know I’m sitting in a room with Kid Rock and Nook Schoenfeld while they described what they needed. Nook drew in Cinema 3D and had all these great renderings laid out on the table. Drawings that had taken him a week to accumulate.
“Now the artist was asking for changes, but he wanted to see them in real time as he requested them,” Rios continues. “Suggestions such as ‘What will it look like if we moved the drummer over here and slid the organ off stage? Now, can you change the color of all the wood paneling to a different driftwood texture so I can look and compare drawings?’ These were changes that could take a lot longer in a CAD drawing that had to be rendered on a laptop than in Photoshop, as we weren’t concerned about 3D at this stage. I came back the next morning having copied all of Nook’s creations into Photoshop. Then the three of us moved stuff, and hashed out the set until the artist was satisfied with the design.”
Sew What introduced Rios to designer Butch Allen, which has bloomed into a great relationship. “I got a call from Butch years ago to do a drawing for a Don Henley show. They wanted a giant clock, I can’t remember what famous clock tower it was, but they wanted imagery that could be printed on a clear, plastic like material. Butch had the idea that he wanted to be able to shoot lights through the backdrop. Sew What had to print my art on to a shower curtain material, per se. “Since then I’ve worked with Butch on projects for Eric Church, Fifth Harmony, Nickelback, etc., and look forward to many more.”
Rios has been known to tackle full set designs as well, with Detroit native Eminem among them. “I drew up a couple of sets for Em over the years that he liked and used. I did not get a call for the last design. Someone had designed a giant water tower for his Coachella headline show that looked really cool and they wanted to tour with that in the U.S., which they did. But when it was time for Em to go overseas, the practicality of shipping and hauling this gigantic piece around Europe was costly. Management came to me to see what I could offer as an alternative, more cost effective, less time consuming to set up at festivals, solution. In the end, I drew up a tall radio tower that had an anvil with his logo on top of it. The tower could be easily assembled and did not require two semi-trucks to transport daily.”
Rios has done the artwork for a couple of tours by the Swedish rockers Ghost. “Gallagher hooked me up with the singer. The band appears in masks or heavy makeup. The singer has kind of a papal attire he wears. They wanted something Goth-looking and church-like. I came up with ancient columns with inert carvings and stained glass elements.” Video walls would take the place of the stained glass, but for shows where the video elements were not available, they had the option to use hand drawn stained glass images on fabric that Rios included in the design.
Rios has designed bongs for Wiz Khalifa and drops for Bad Religion and more than 30 other bands. To view more of John’s artwork take a look at his site, www.johnriosdesigns.com, or www.facebook.com/johnriosdesigns.
