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Image Tuesday

Today I’ve selected another piece not seen much. The very talented Brian Churilla created a uniquely cool series called The Secret History Of D.B. Cooper, published by the good people of Oni Press. It has this wonderful mix of strange mystery and surrealism that I really could get into. They asked me to do a variant cover for the series. Brian was going for a sort of pop art very graphic nature to the covers for this, so I wanted to do the same but without duplicating the exact feel of his images, to do my own take. The story dealt with alternate realities with touches of noir. I decided it would be interesting to really play that up for the composition, showing Cooper crossing realities through use of a very simple split composition that acts as a device of seeing the character in two realities, but more symbolically and through use of action movement, having the art change in style and techniques depending on which dimension side you’re viewing while also remaining one single image. By use of textures and style changes, keeping the backgrounds very simplistic allows for all of the focus to remain on the action. And as that action crosses into another dimension it was key in having that transition line be very simple, almost subtle but not quite, to not interfere with the action immediacy. The really fun part about this idea was showing this hint of a Lovecratian creature crossing through the dimensions, and having its colors shift depending which dimensional side you look at, and then do the same idea to D.B. as he is on the attack. I’m displaying the piece below without text, and then two versions of the logo treatment. The first logo treatment was attempting to play on the dimensional dividing line in the art, applying that to how the logo and text fit compositionally with the image. A decent enough idea, but it was decided that it just wasn’t popping enough, so the second version is what we went with, it pops with a little more color. As fun as it was to do this piece, it was so much more fun getting to read the book, which everyone should do.

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