On March 16th, legendary IRON MAIDEN artist Derek Riggs - the man behind the band's iconic mascot, Eddie - spoke with The Rockin' Rag's Rock'n Rolivia at the grand opening of the Rock Your Loxx hair salon in Oceanside, CA. Check it out below:

Back in September 2010, Mikhail Madnani at Metal Assault caught up Riggs for an exclusive in-depth interview. Here are a few excerpts from the chat:

Metal Assault: Your last few pieces of art for Iron Maiden have all been digital. Would you consider getting back to painting for them?

Riggs: "Well I might do one or two but for the most part I can't do the painting thing anymore, the chemicals in the paints ended up making me ill so I had to give it up. If I hadn't just discovered digital art I would have just stopped doing it all together."

Metal Assault: Do you get royalties for any Iron Maiden merchandise including CDs that have your artwork?

Riggs: "No, none at all. I sold the remaining rights many years ago."

Metal Assault: Do you have any Iron Maiden related paintings with you?

Riggs: "I do not have any at all, not even any sketches. And NO, I don't have any buried away in a cupboard anywhere. I have moved house about five times since I gave up doing the Maiden covers. Three of those times I threw everything away and just walked away with a bag of clothes - like when I moved to the USA, I arrived in the USA with just one bag of hand luggage and the hard drives of my artwork that I had already posted to a friend's house in the USA ahead of me."

Metal Assault: Why did you decide to have your signature (The D and R back to back) hidden / hard to find in most paintings of yours? Were you going for a Where's Waldo kind of thing?

Riggs: "I used to paint book covers and my signature was a bit big and it was a bit distracting on the cover so they agents that I used at that time asked me if I could make it smaller so it didn't show up so much, so I made the first version (the one on the early albums) and to make sure that it got onto the cover and didn't get cropped off at the printers I hid it in the picture instead of putting it at the edge where it shows up more and is likely to be cropped. Most of these little things that people think are deliberate attempts to do this or that thing is actually me being pragmatic and finding solutions to the strange habits of art editors and requests of clients."

Metal Assault: I've read in your book that many of the paintings that you did for iron maiden, never came out well on the CD/LP cover because the printers couldn't photograph them correctly. Do you think this affected the overall effect you were going for with the art?

Riggs: "Yes, definitely. When you shift the colour balance of an artwork it always changes it completely. It can completely destroy the impact of an artwork. Luckily with digital artwork it is not so much of a problem these days. You would not believe some of the things that were being published because the people in the record companies didn't think it was important or just didn't care. Try it yourself, get some picture editing software, get a painting and try shifting the colours about a bit and you will see that even a small shift makes a huge difference to a picture."

Read the entire interview here.