Chekhov Poster: Three Sisters

My lastest poster trials, this time for Three Sisters. Unlike The Cherry Orchard poster that I'm doing, this one is openly in the Saul Bass poster style of the 60's. 

The images that I kept wanting to use were the three sisters themselves, and the scene of the house burning. And then I realized...USE BOTH OF THE IMAGES (their hair doubles as flames in the poster. ta-da.)

I also wanted a sense of claustrophobia and even madness to the image, which I also feel like it properly conveys. 

Sketchbook

A few pages of some of the work I've been doing. 

Red pens and red colored pencils have been my best friends this past week. 

Self Portrait

Another self-portrait in oils. Rembrandt-inspired. 

Alla-prima, from life, with:

Ivory Black

Titanium White

Burnt Sienna

Yellow Ochre 

Also, I'm kind of in love with my own brushwork. I literally zoom in all the way in Photoshop and just look at it. 

Poster Comps: The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov

First run-throughs for my Anton Chekhov poster series.

#1: The Cherry Orchard

My concept deals with counterpointing nostalgia with darkness and grittiness. I wanted the poster to look like a paper cutout illustration circo 1960 / 70. Even though the play "takes place" at the turn of the 1900's, I feel like 60's and 70's imagery is more nostalgic for modern audiences.


And for your viewing pleasure, here's how I go about it.


1-A way-too-fast, half-assed sketch

2-Me spending a bajillion hours trying to make shapes from my sketch using the pen tool in Adobe Illustrator

3-And finally a few ideas that are still FAR from being done, but probably one of these will probably end up being the final. As you can see, I'm moving away from the centered-saw composition in light of something a bit more dynamic.

UPDATES TO COME. 

Oh look what I found.

So, I just found this really old book cover comp that I made a few months ago for David Foster Wallace's A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. It's a phenomenal collection of that man's essays. Think of it like David Sedaris but much more cynical, more cerebral, and lots lots LOTS more footnotes.

This is a screenshot which is why the type looks so screwy. I promise you that I use normal typefaces.

I still really like this approach, and I'll probably be coming back to this sometime in the future.

Work Infographic

magic

Chekhov Cards

Russian Lit assignment. First experiments.

*Also, I can't be sure of any of the Russian text. I just do as translate.google.com tells me. 

I wanted something extremely simple, but at the same time potent and modern. The short story tells the tale of a hallucinating, megalomaniac named Andrey Vassilitch Korvin who is having visions of a black monk, who tells him that he is chosen by God to lead humanity into a brighter future. The majority of the story takes place at his soon-to-be-father-in-law's gardens and orchards: trees and fruits about which the old man obsesses to the point of neurosis. Like many of Chekhov's characters, Korvin becomes disillusioned, miserable, divorced, more miserable, catches tuberculosis, and then dies. Also his father-in-law dies. 

Honestly though, the story is pretty incredible—in fact, you can read the whole splendid thing here. 

The upside-down growing apple, or the cut, hanging pear both play with formalistic and naturalistic imagery in unnatural states, which I believe properly describes the whole timbre of the story without being vulgarly literal, plus I just love that cut pear with its weird asymmetry and that dark seed pushing out of it.