I’m Nate Hail (b. 1992), a multimedia creator and musician at heart, born in Finland and now based in the United States. I’m an artist with a deep love for music, with a creative foundation rooted in drawing, graphic design, screen printing, and hands-on making. Raised by a crafter and a DIY tinkerer, I learned how to build, fix, and create across nearly any medium.

I briefly studied at an art school in Albuquerque, but like many artists, I couldn’t remain a “starving artist” forever. That reality led me into retail, where I spent much of my professional life while continuing to make art on the side. Eventually, I made a major life shift—I bought a van, converted it into a camper, and traveled throughout the Southwest. During this time, I discovered an off-grid intentional community in Northern New Mexico, where I lived as a resident and ran their screen-printing studio and cottage industry, managing online orders and custom projects.

That experience is where everything came together. I began to see how my creative practice and my background in retail could inform each other, pairing art-making with an understanding of how objects live in the real world. This realization led me to build my own independent art business.

I’m the founder and artist behind paintedrecords.com, an ongoing, long-term project centered on hand-painted miniature album covers. Painting wasn’t my original discipline, and for a long time I avoided it altogether. After eight years of screen printing, however, the process reshaped how I see images in layers and ultimately unlocked painting as a new way of working.

Music—especially my love for vinyl records and analog sound—sits at the core of this work. I’m drawn to a time when album covers were as essential as the music itself, serving as physical extensions of the listening experience. By transforming album artwork into tangible, hand-painted objects, I aim to reintroduce an analog sensibility—restoring a sense of permanence, tactility, and visual depth. During an intense three-month period, I completed nearly 150 paintings, and I continue to expand my collection, with a long-term goal of 1,000 works over the next five years.