I was excited to participate in Eileen Steinbach's DECK THE WALLS holiday themed poster project, but I knew I could only spare three days of work for it as I was under a deadline for my last official job of the year.
With a huge time crunch, I had to approach this piece differently. I couldn't afford to do a large scale, complex, multi-character fully hand illustrated movie poster like my work often becomes. So I went with a simpler idea that I knew I could execute quickly, and settled on the final artwork being a photo comp illustration, which is a mix of photographic assets that were either heavily or lightly painted over, with some more hand-illustrated components (like the wall).
The concept came from a collaboration with my husband, Adam. He loves to come up with ideas but I usually have to ask that he wait until I have an idea of my own before I welcome his suggestions. In this case, after spending about 30 minutes toying with one quickly abandoned idea on my own, I invited him into the conversation about what concept I could execute quickly.
My abandoned idea attempted to graphically zoom in on the green Santa wrapping paper from the film, replacing one of the Santa faces for Arthur's face to foreshadow Arthur becoming the next Santa. I determined there wasn't a workable concept in that particular manifestation of the idea, but I liked the narrow focus that thinking it out had given me: I definitely wanted to do something that eluded to Arthur becoming the next Santa. So Adam suggested that instead I illustrate the hallway of Santa portraits to convey the same idea in a more literal way. Showing Arthur running down the Santa portrait hallway carrying Gwen's forgotten bicycle with a trail of Santa letters scattering behind him seemed perfect. I could then compositionally place Arthur's face right where the next Santa successor's portrait would go.
We both simultaneously jotted down our own quick thumbnails of the idea, and our compositions were essentially the same, albeit his sketch was much more rendered than my scribble! I then took the idea and ran with it, building a photo composite out of multiple screenshots cut up and pieced together like a paper doll. Then I started painting, going back and forth trying to figure out the lighting of the hallway, the overall brightness, and the title treatment until I arrived at the final product.
It was a lot of fun, and I'm glad I got the chance to create a little something for one of my favorite Christmas movies.
Thanks for the help, Adam! Being married to a creative person is THE BEST.
