Poster: Phantom of the Opera (1925) Lon Chaney

 

This was one I wanted to add to my monster poster series for a while but finding the right image was not so easy. I went through the restored version of the film and many publicity photos to find something I thought was at least a little out of the ordinary. I blew up a frame from the masquerade sequence, which was also filmed in early colour, as well was reached out images of that Red death costume from other sources. I kept the composition simple, like the rest of the series. Even though ti was technically "in colour" and restored, the image was still not as detailed as I would have liked and the early colour was sort of all over the place frame by frame. Some things red in one frame were orange in another and some shadows were variations of green.  I like to do folds in cloth and this certainly has plenty of that! 

The logo was taken from the 1925 posters and lobby cards. I hand drew it from the references and tried to keep the colours true to the original. 

Poster project: Lon Chaney Jr's The Wolfman

 

Click image for larger version.

This was the one that started it all and almost anded it all. I tried several times to do a Wolfman illustration/poster over the years and never came close to getting anything close to what I envisioned. This is pretty far from what I going for back then, but I have been fairly successful or at least having enough fun with making monster poster more recently and gave Lawrence Talbot another go. 

I made a pretty detailed sketch based on quite a few reference images. I wasn't sure how much I wanted to show his shirt details and decided to try a style in-between the giant monsters and the classic horror monster posters. So mostly black and white wth hints of colour and still used the charcoal brushes in Krita  for the character. I used some brushes in Affinity photo and modified a 3 moon image I made a long while back which I painted over. The logo is from the opening credits of the film and remade in Affinity Designer. 

Despite the references I have myself  much more liberty to use my own imagination in the pose, details and lighting than in previous projects. Sadly the TONS of detailed I put into the fur on the head is now hidden in shadow but it looks better this way in my opinion. 

This one has a true "move poster" vibe to it. 

Nosferatu poster project

 

I seem motivated by monsters these days. When I get an idea and the urge to realize it I'm trying just close the door to the studio and work until I'm done. I started this one a day ago but did about 7 hours on it today. 

The Twilight Zone is 60 years old!

It's the 60th anniversary of the Twilight Zone TV show this year and it's another show I can not believe I did not think of before when doing this icons series. Rod Serling is a personal hero of mine, as much as I have heroes. Not just his writing and creativity, but his moral and intellectual stances are all things we should strive to integrate into our lives. His war experiences coloured everything he did afterword and he suffered that trauma by being a better person and giving us fantastic art with messages we can still learn from.

I tried to give the items in the illustration a glow, similar to what we would see on out black and white TV when I originally watched the show.