HP Lovecraft Film Festival and CthulhuCon!
Iä! Iä! I’m not going to be able to make it to NecronomiCon this year due to a family commitment, but I really wanted to go to at least one big Lovecrafty event in 2013… and that event is going to be the HP Lovecraft Film Festival and CthulhuCon in Los Angeles on September 27-29! And not only will I be there, I also drew the poster. You can see my original first (well, secondish) draft of the poster here, and I highly recommend you go to the film festival facebook page to see the final version with text and improved, brightened colors!
I’m really looking forward to going to Los Angeles. Hopefully in addition to the festival, I’ll get to see my family and my L.A. peeps such as Lanny Liu, Derek Kirk Kim, Michael Kenny and all the other people I tragically forgot to include in this sentence. But what am I saying — the festival is only three days long! Jay (who helped immeasurably with the colors for this poster) and I will probably have our hands full just being at the theater, talking to folks, meeting the guests such as horror/fantasy Arkham House author Gary Myers and seeing films including hopefully, I hear, the trailer for Huan Vu’s feature-length original movie The Dreamlands — the ONLY full-length film ever made based on one of HPL’s dream stories that I’m aware of. I was very kindly invited to do some work on the film project and I really regret that due to time commitments I wasn’t able to. But I look forward to seeing it, and perhaps doing some Dreamlands: The Movie fan art in the future…
Anyway! This poster was inspired by Lovecraft’s brief stint working as a ticket-taker at a movie theater (really!), a subject which was recently researched in a fascinating blog post by David Haden at Tentaclii. I decided to focus on Lovecraft’s more obscure monsters (with a few obvious exceptions such as the Deep Ones and Cthulhu), but I bet anyone who’s familiar with all of his stories and revisions will be able to identify them pretty quickly (?). Go check out the final (?) version of the poster here! And see you in L.A. in September!
WOW! Now THAT’S the finest example of colouring your linework I’ve seen! I always thought before that your art works better in B&W than in colour, but THIS is how to do it right! This poster is amazing!
Did you check out the version on Facebook, the official version? The touchups and color fixes are done by Kirsten Hageleit! :)
Also, I think I prefer the colours in this version to the ones in the final one. They may be brighter there, but the balance here seems to work better (or it may just be my monitor).
Whoops, didn’t see your comment before I posted. So yes, I do like this version more. I prefer the more relaxed but more balanced pastel-hues here (but of course, maybe it only works well on the computer monitor and not when printed out).
Just wondering… are you allowed to make this illustration into a poster (without the text at the top, and with the original colour scheme) and sell prints of it? This sort of thing is something I’d seriously consider hanging on my wall.
The HPL Film Festival/CthulhuCon people will be selling posters! :) More news to follow in a few weeks, I think.