Sellin’ my wares…

Just thought I’d drop it in here that I’ve set up an additional Big Cartel site for selling prints and the like; Etsy’s not for everyone, so hopefully this will make it easier for folks to buy something they like.

Cheers!

 

Yojimbo (1961)

Okay, so the film posters roll on. In between the day job and the not-always-exciting commission work, I find experimenting with film posters pretty satisfying. It lets me play in the sandbox with some of my favourite things, and I get to practice my chops without the shadow of deadlines, etc.

The American Werewolf In London poster I created recently was an attempt to combine the film content with the collage style I feel so comfortable with. For some reason I’ve never tried putting them together before. It was an old Polish poster that got me to think about it, and the AWIL piece was an unruly homage/rip-off. Any artist will tell you that you start by imitation. It’s a little like a colouring book: start with a guide that shows you where the lines are, and pretty soon it’ll come naturally.

Yojimbo is a pretty spectacular film. I used to have this impression of Kurosawa a few years ago, before I’d seen any of his films, that they were very humourless. I’ve no idea where that came from, but I think it’s a prevalent misconception. I eventually caught one short clip, from Yojimbo, that made me want to investigate: after Toshiro Mifune’s first dust-up with the village thugs, he shouts across the street to the coffin-maker – “Cooper! Two coffins.” He then turns his head and re-evaluates the carnage he’s left behind. “Maybe three.” It’s a very knowing scene, I think.

Thinking about what film I wanted to take a poke at next, Yojimbo was up. I wanted to continue with the collage approach, but in the initial layout stage something else came to the front. The strong colours and negative space are a direct result of me looking over dozens of old Polish posters, specifically Westerns, working out why they worked, or at least why they worked for me. I decided to branch off, temporarily, with this piece. The heart of the thing is Mifune: this is his Gary Cooper moment, his High Noon showdown. It’s so iconic. The actual scene is wonderful, beautifully shot, dramatic, the combination of direction, timing and score are flawless. I wanted this icon, the black heart in a red emptiness, to be as strong as possible.

It usually takes a little while for me to figure out if anything I’ve done has any merit to it, and I’m still waiting for the other shoe to drop on this. It might work. Maybe not. But it was a worthwhile experiment. In the meantime, I’m still tinkering with the collage version. To be continued…

An American Werewolf In London (1981)

“You’d be surprised what horrors a man is capable of.”

I don’t write anywhere near as much about my work as I used to. Occasionally I flick through old posts and cringe a little. It’s like hearing your voice on tape – “God, do I really sound like that?” But sometimes it helps to flesh out the context a little.

I watch a lot of movies. Especially old movies. My overbearing retrophilia aside, I also really love old film posters. The industry was different, as was marketing and advertising. Contemporary film advertising is just oogey vanilla. It’s almost completely standardised, set, fixed, and dull. The marketing people tell the studio they need a star to sell the picture, so nearly all posters are now just glorified headshots of actors, photoshopped into waxen austerity. Posters have become generic, uninspired, the cinematic equivalent of cornflakes packaging.

That kind of explains some of why I like doing this stuff. It’s the way I’d like to see something advertised – indirect, messy, a little enigmatic. I want it to stand on it’s own as a piece of art, rather than just a marketing tool. Most film posters I’ve played around with so far have been in that very simplified, minimalist style of graphics – originally this was a way for me to turn out some work quickly and also to learn some restraint. My natural impulse is towards clutter.

Well, I’ve done a lot of simple shit. This is back to my home territory.

 

 

From The Deepest Chest

This here’s another design I produced pretty quickly over the last few days. The quote is one I’ve had rattling around inside my head for the better part of six years – I used it once in the past, in a sketch, but it felt good enough to revisit.

Another accident this, really. I was just playing with the form of a typewriter; there are plenty of advertisements for typewriters in the stacks of vintage magazines I’ve squirreled away over the years, and they just have a nice solid, simple shape that lends itself to print. The first attempt was much busier, with a lot of extra crap filling out the space. It looked almost like a page from Craphound magazine. The simpler approach was what it needed, though.

Prints to BUY

A Single Purpose

This thing grew out of the clusterfucked collage I started a few months ago, with the end result being an attempt to break it down into simpler, panel-like images that stood strongly on their own.

I seem to shoot myself in the foot a lot when it comes to subject matter, really. I keep choosing stuff that isn’t really that popular or well known, because when I actually find the time to sit down and create something between the day job and paid commissions, I want to work with subject matter that I can get excited about.

I can totally get excited about The Twilight Zone.

Lord Of The Flies (1954)

“The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.”

Hump

 

I’ve been working on some new collages to turn into acrylic transfers, and this thing emerged somewhere along the road. I’d planned on doing a really large A3 transfer piece that was just a mess of images, a sticky chunk of nonsense that blended historical and religious iconography with a lot of modern-ish pop culture trash.

I realised, as I sometimes have the good sense to do, that the way I was going about it was too haphazard to produce anything worthwhile. It needed broken up a little to make it flow, it needed to be more bite-sized. One of the images I was working with was of the Italian B-movie babe Edwige Fenech, who I’ve developed a bit of a thing for. It’s the eyes. She has these enormous,  panda-eyes that are usually floating in a universe of kohl. The plan was to create this Eve-meets-Boudica kind of image, a tongue in cheek thing playing off the traditional role of women in fine art. Not one for the ages, but whatever. The more I developed the imagery, the stronger this bison silhouette became and the weaker the Italian femme, until I just removed it completely and packed it away for another day.

Murder your darlings, as they say.

Lunar Dance On A Sugarcube Moon

Shameless Self Promotion

Just thought I’d throw it out there that Shortlist.com have featured my “The Birds” movie poster in an article about the best alternative Hitchcock posters. Okay, so mine is like the least professional looking one on there, but still it’s nice to be included. Maybe I’m the “meat in the room”, as Tom Hollander says.

The Pixel Curse design website also featured this poster a while back, in an article about contemporary minimalist design – here’s a wee link.

And last but not least, Cicada Books, a little publisher in London, released a cute book about the resurgent moustache culture and very kindly included my “Influential Moustaches Throughout History” piece as one of the lead images. Check it out!

War Of The Worlds (1898)

Here’s another one of the book jacket illustrations I did a while back, althought this one came a while after the initial batch. I’ve been snooping around my portfolio and came across a few bits and pieces that I never posted online, including this, and thought it worthwhile to include.

This is for the H.G. Wells original novel, and not for any of the movies (although I actually love the Jeff Wayne prog-opera musical version, too). Retro video game graphics seem to be pretty popular right now, and the Space Invaders icon just seemed a natural choice. It’s a challenge trying to take just a couple of elements like basic shapes and only a few colours to convey something…I’m not saying I always make it work, but it’s a pretty good exercise to keep your design claws sharp.

The design was primarily inspired by one sentence from the introduction to the novel, made infamous by the 1938 Orson Welles Mercury Theatre production: “…yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this Earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.”

So this was my “across the gulf of space” image, I guess. Got a print for sale too, guys.