And one for the Angelinos...

Before I forget, the closing night reception for A Murder of Crows at Gallery Meltdown in L.A. is TONIGHT, 6-10 PM. I'm told there will be "a costume contest and light refreshments," and that all artwork, including my "Troubling of Goldfish" and Jason Polan's "Journey of Giraffes" (above), among many others, will be cash and carry.

King Con Brooklyn: Nov 7-8

Hey, New Yorkers!!

I'll be set up with a table at next weekend's KING CON BROOKLYN, selling newly-printed copies of EGG #1, hopefully a few NEW mini-comics if they're ready in time, and a selection of artwork (these prints and a few new things).

So if you're anywhere near the NYC area, come on by the Brooklyn Lyceum, located at 227 4th Avenue, next weekend, November 7-8. Tickets are very reasonable: $7/day or $10/weekend, and well beyond my own minor contributions, it sounds like it should be a pretty well-stocked show, with lots of interesting people, from Jonathan Ames to Cliff Chiang to Al Jaffee to Harvey Pekar to Jamie Tanner to Brian Wood... there's a full list here.

Hope to see you then!

El Descumbrimiento

Here's another I had meant to post about a while back, but it kept slipping my mind...

At the end of last year, out of the blue, I got an incredibly flattering email from the fine actor Julio César Cedillo, (who you may recall from The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, if you've ever seen that film), asking me to design a poster for this short film by a young Mexican director, Alonso Alvarez Barreda: El Descumbrimiento (The Finding). Julio was so genuine in his excitement for the project, and so complimentary of my work, that I just couldn't say no.

The film is about a father and son coping with the loss of their wife/mother, and they had plenty of great on-set photography to work with. My first concept was to try to suggest an absence or hole in the center of the relationship between father and son, represented very simply and graphically:



A second option was a little bit generic, but I thought the two images involved were compelling and was trying to find a way to combine them. (I'm not sure how successful I was.)



Julio and Alonso liked the concept of the first one but worried it wasn't quite coming through, so I tried a rougher version, more obviously a "hole" rather than just a circle.



And finally there was this more oblique version, which just captured the visual style of the film nicely. (By the way, they ultimately wanted to have versions in both English and Spanish, which is why I keep switching the title back and forth.) They also asked for a few minor variations to that--desaturating and resaturating the color, new title treatments:



I was pretty happy with the "hole" version, personally, but ultimately they liked that last version best, that's what they went with for the screening at the San Diego Film Festival. Looking at their Facebook page, I guess they've changed it a bit since then... Not sure who did the new version, I'm only just noticing it now, to be honest.

"A Murder of Crows," addendum

Oops, forgot to link to Gallery Meltdown again before the opening. Anyway, all of the pieces are now conveniently available to view on the gallery's blog. I think Steven Weissman's might be my favorite:



I imagine the Eddie Izzard fans out there might want to note that this gentlemen likes his women like he likes his coffee... covered in bees!

Downhill Racer

Uh oh... this brings us to the end of my cache of pre-written posts. I'll try to get a few more under my belt ASAP to prevent future delays, but, y'know, good intentions are the devil's asphalt (or whatever that saying is.) Anyway...

The concept for Downhill Racer came pretty easily: the film, about an arrogant but talented athlete, has some really dynamic skiing visuals, and a freeze-frame sequence during the opening credits that just begs to be made into a cover. There was also this pretty great-looking original poster:



...but frankly, the film is anything but a love story, and we all felt it was pretty misleading. Better, I thought, to focus on the great skiing cinematography--shot on skis in large part--that's such a big part of the film. So here's a bunch of comps based on framegrabs from the film, which I think give a nice flavor for the movie:



I did try a few variations on the original poster, trying to focus on the arrogance of Redford's character rather than the less-important "love" story, but that wound up looking too "Hollywood," like we were just trying to put a big celebrity head on the disc to sell some copies. (Not that there's anything wrong with selling some copies!) And the other version is just a bit flat.



So that first one up top was the favorite, but no one was quite sold on the type. I tried a few more options, with the boldest below emerging as the favorite:



We went back and forth on whether we should include stars names or not, and finally decided we'd be shooting ourselves in the foot to NOT mention Robert Redford and Gene Hackman when we have the chance, so on they went, and here's the final cover: