Gwoodie by Lionus (2004)

Soon to be appearing at your favorite DVD retailer. ;)

I have a slowly growing collection of movies on DVD and one of the things that induces me to buy a DVD is their cover art. Like posters of movies or stage plays the artwork has to work by suggestion and curiosity. 'Who are those characters and why are they doing what I see them doing?' Watch a fellow shopper and you will see that puzzled curious look on their faces. It is the artist's task to tease the would-be buyer with just a hint of the story without giving the story away.

The idea for "Pursuit of the Golden Woodie" came to me last summer when I was outside mowing the lawn. It is a comedy movie that I came up with in my imagination that I would love to go and see in real life. Full of double-meanings, role-reversals, unexpected changes of fortunes, greed, naive innocence, lust, imminent virginal sex, and love all centered around a billionaire's death-bed (?) wish to pass on his estate to someone "nobly endowed with lengthy masculine attributes".

Pencil to Photoshop. Group pics are a lot of fun to do since by their nature they tell a story. So while you are drawing the pic or spending the long hours coloring it you are imagining all the twists and turns of the story's plot. The hardest part in actually doing this piece concerned the part that tends to show the least -- the three-plane background. The mansion, the ballpark and the locker room. Each plane, with its complexity, possesses the ability to drag the eye away from the story I was trying to tell in the foreground. Yet I needed to allow each of the background locations to be recognizable for what they were or they would pulled the viewer's attention to them out of puzzlement. It ended up as a finely tuned balancing art that I think succeeded. What do you think?