Skin And Bones: (clockwise from top) Riggs’ full painting for the Somewhere in Time album, Eddie gives the finger in a Christmas card design, the cover for The Trooper, the troublesome “Twilight Zone” single art, and the cover of the band’s self-titled debut.


maiden.com, the band has sold more than 80 mil- lion albums worldwide) often meant challenging deadlines and projects pitched with precious little notice. “[Work] got done to a stupidly tight deadline and it


went out the door,” says Riggs. “I did have a partic- ularly bad weekend with [Iron Maiden’s fourth single] ‘Twilight Zone.’ I had two days to get a cover done. The only stuff I had was CS10 line board – chalk- coated board made for line work – and it’s waterproof. So the paint was sliding around and wouldn’t dry. When it eventually did, the next brush stroke would take it off again. I ended up painting flat colours on it and airbrush- ing the tones on top of that. That’s why it’s a bit crap!” It certainly explains why Riggs is unrepentant about


moving with the times and introducing digital colour to his palette. “These days I work on a computer because it works


better, and is less toxic. Paint is very poisonous stuff, you know,” he says. “People think that be- cause it’s done with a computer anyone can do it with the press of a button. Well you can’t, try it. I never use things just as the computer renders them. I always post-process everything... . Technical purity is for assholes.” For nearly two decades, Maiden and Riggs seemed


like a marriage made in heaven, but after endlessly re-envisioning one character against uncompromising deadlines, the strain between the artist and the metal mavens became apparent. In 2000, after a brief down- turn, a creative rebirth for the band seemed imminent. The twelfth studio album, Brave New World, which marked the return of long-time singer Bruce Dickinson (who left the band in 1993) and guitarist Adrian Smith (who left in 1990), was initially slated to be called The


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