I would like to claim that I was the only kid in Darlington that had a Wu Wear jersey in 1999. It’s probably not true, but I never saw another. I developed an intense fascination with the Wu-Tang Clan in my later secondary school years. Must have been the undeniable parallels I felt, in my formative years on the Grange Estate in Hurworth-on-Tees, with the Park Hill project in Staten Island that birthed the legendary group. To this day, my brother and I can recite the infamous skit from their debut album that precedes the absolutely phenomenal M.E.T.H.O.D. Man (“I’ll just keep feedin’ you, and FEEDIN’ you…”) word-for-word. And often do.
So imagine how nuts I went when I was contacted about the possibility of pitching a cover concept to RZA’s 36 Chambers Record Label for a new album being prepped by long-time group DJ Mathematics. The record was to be themed around Blaxploitation movie scores and tracks, forming the bedrock of each song. I was sent a huge cachet of posters from the era as inspiration, as well as concept art by Mathematics himself – fucking daunting given that he is the man who created the famous W logo. I’d been contacted after posting my Coffy alternative poster. The designs leaned heavily into a busy image of besuited badasses and babes, the draft I saw modelled mostly on 1973’s Black Caesar. Given that this had already been covered, I thought, why not swing for something a bit eye-catching in the same vein? So I cobbled together a direct riff on the brilliant Super Fly poster, a little on the nose of course, but I had a really clear idea of how a white, pink, and purple colour scheme could absolutely jump off the shelves (actual, and digital) in a genre that perhaps shied away from this particular look.
I rushed this placeholder draft out in watercolour pencils, adding a Wu-Tang logo that was hewn out of two tower blocks from that same Park Hill neighbourhood that so fascinated me when I learned how they dubbed the area Shaolin, with the members of the group posed in front of it. On the back cover, I wanted to evoke the nostalgia so many aficionados of cult films feel for the faded fleapits and grindhouses of New York’s 42nd Street. While, for me, this was something I didn’t even know I’d missed until it was long, long gone, the members of the group would have really experienced those cinemas, discovering the Kung Fu gems that so influenced their lexicon.
But, my preferred design sought to reference the brief more tangentially – I saw many posters that used a stark black, yellow, and white colour scheme:
…and figured, what if I could avoid the cliche and the visual overload, while keeping the feel? Many posters include a cityscape, so I grabbed a vintage 1970s photograph of the New York skyline taken from the perspective of the Staten Island ferry as it approaches – figuring, it could evoke the journey the group’s members may have taken into Times Square to see these same, infamous features. I ran a risoprint filter of the image, after isolating the buildings and adding a more highly-contrasted photograph of clouds, to allow for some additional texture.
I ran the filter over the skyline separately, then manually lined up the two images, so that the black and white buildings stood stark against the yellow and white sky.
I used the Wu-Tang W to create a cutout against the buildings, and separately against the sky, and then finally utilised the detailed buildings and bridges to cut off the solid yellow background at the horizon line, leaving the lower third free for ‘credits’ in a font that I felt straddled the line between 1970s-appropriate, with a modern edge. You can see the struts of the bridge at the outer edges if you look close enough.
For the back cover, I repurposed the same image of a broken-down awning, the album name emblazened on it. The work here is extremely rough as it was only intended to be a very indicative, low-res concept pitch, but I thought the overall piece looked like something that brought the right feeling of the 1970s, without seeming too try-hard or tacky. Bold, but not fussy.
Ultimately, of course, this was as far as the job went – I was super happy for the opportunity, a bit bummed out that I didn’t get to contribute to one of my favourite musicians of all time, and fired up to try again.
A film I have a complicated relationship with, but made for a really interesting Rewind Movie Podcast episode. I wanted to utilise the very overused, well-known image of Andrew “Large” Largeman sinking into the background as he tries on a shirt made from the same material as the recently renovated bathroom in his childhood home from which he has become so alienated (why was there leftover fabric from a bathroom wall that could be used to make a man’s shirt? I do not know!), but give it a bit more thematic weight.
I sourced the closest analogue I could find of the wallpaper pattern, a William Morris (proud son of Walthamstow!) design called Acanthus. I could only find a small square, so I had to line it up by eye and create a repeatable pattern big enough to fill a Photoshop square. I then eyeballed a purple and green colour-scheme based partly on the screenshots I could source from the movie, and partly one that I thought seemed attractive – aware that I was going to potentially tweak this heavily later.
I used a faux-vectoring technique (I no longer have Illustrator, so have to create a workaround using a YouTube video from TextureLabs that is intended to mimic screenprinting) to create a three colour Braff face, that I matched to the colours in the wallpaper pattern. I manually erased some of his face to allow tendrils of the background plants to show through on his face.
Then, I didn’t like the cartoony boldness – so I ran it through a Studio 2am effect called Indie Dreams, which seemed appropriate in capturing a hazy, early-’00s sensitive colour pallete. There were a number of options, so I used one that shifted more towards a colder green/purple tone. It helped to remove some of the lazy pixellation I’d left in my haste to construct the wallpaper pattern. Finally, I grabbed a font that seemed to match a less familiar release poster I’d found, a blocky serif font called Flamente Cairo. I stuck to the late-Gen-X penchant for all lower case text, and added the same festival laurels that the poster I sourced proclaimed. It felt, again, true to 2004 to trumpet the cachet that came with festival slots in the dog days of the Peak Sundance era.
Dan O’Bannon’s anarchic 1985 debut feature may be one of the absolute highlighs of the zombie subgenre – funny, poignant, cynical, and gruesome. The first sequel, directed in 1988 by Ken Wiederhorn, fell flat, despite recycling a number of cast members from the original film in recast roles. Prolific producer/director Brian Yuzna’s third installment succeeds in crafting a weird new spin on the tale of the troublesome 2-4-5 Trioxin gas – an angsty, doomed romantic drama that sees the rebellious teen son of a ranking American military official sneak into his father’s secretive base with his punky girlfriend to witness their experiments on with the zombification agent.
When his beloved Julie dies in a sickening motorcycle accident, he commits the fatal error of reanimating her – complete with an insatiable new hunger for human brains. As they run afoul of a group of local thugs, Julie develops a sick fascination with physical pain – eventually transforming herself into a sadomasichistic human weapon studded with twisted metal and broken glass.
I’ve kept this design very simple, focussing (understandably) on the striking image of Melinda Clarke’s Julie in full, fucked up battle mode. The colour scheme came from two sources – first the video box/release poster, which yielded the maroon and yellow. I wanted to keep these designs as close as possible to realistic screen print as possible – 2 colour, in this case. The exact shade of maroon comes from the colour of the shirts available in my Teemill store. The title font and tagline font are inspired by, but not slavish recreations of, that found on the title card in the film and on the poster. The exception is the numerical 3 – that’s a direct image trace. The alternative version pulls a pale blue and pink scheme from the movie’s title card itself. Again, the idea was to run as close as possible to screen printing techniques, so those two colours, plus white, are the only colours used.
Thanks to the wonderful digital terrestrial channel Talking Pictures TV, I’ve recently become a little fixated on the classic 1960s sci-fi anthology series The Outer Limits. When I was a kid, the 1990s remake series was something that I dimly recall watching, and I think enjoying? Certainly the legendary Control Voice introduction has stuck around in my memory, but not much beyond this. But on a lazy weekday afternoon, searching for something to watch in the background while sketching, I came across an episode from the show’s original series and I was, first and foremost, absolutely floored by the incredible lighting in the episode – so much so I dropped the pencils and watched the full hour. Objects and characters glowed like pearls, within spartan, functional sets that helped to emphasise an almost dreamlike strangeness. It turns out, these wonderful visuals were the work of Conrad Hall, ace cinematographer of Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Marathon Man and more. Hall worked on 15 of the original run of 49 episodes, alongside TV veteran John M. Nickolaus Jr. and Kenneth D. Peach, Sr. (who, remarkably, started out on the legendary 1933 King Kong before working with Laurel and Hardy on a number of features), and his episodes, with all respect to those fine technicians, really do stand out.
The 2nd thing that drew me to the episode was the truly hypnotic Joanna Frank as the beautiful Regina – whom the story immediately imparts is a queen bee who has been transformed by some sort of baffling bee science to attempt to seduce a stoic scientist into coupling with her to produce a superhybrid race of Api-Humans. She is, quite simply, one of the most striking actresses I’ve ever seen on TV or film. Her scant list of other appearances only served to highten the mystery of her strange, mannered performance, peering up past a sweep of dark hair that hides half of her face, studying the kindly couple that take her in as a live-in assistant in the lab of Ben, the avuncular husband who is hard at work building a machine that can talk to bees. His wife, Francesca, quickly cottons onto the weirdness, but is perhaps too late in identifying the danger of her young would-be usurper.
I’ve quickly become extremely fond of the series – I adore the sturdy writing that quaintly seeks to stick the landing of its coherent, if sometimes familiar, premises, each episode methodically doling out pertinent information in a recognisable act-structure. So here I present what I hope is an era-appropriate poster homage to this odd little tale. Using some extremely poor resolution screenshots from the show, and a stock photo of a bee’s head, I had to go a little heavy on the texture-making to disguise the pixellation and flaws, but I hope in a way that looks authentic. It’s a little intentionally schlockier than perhaps a genuine ad would have been at the time, but I liked the idea of juxtaposing the conflicted expression of old scientist Ben as he ponders the mysterious Regina, while his wife clocks her for what she really is – a giant usurping bee. Hopefully the similar shapes of the face of Regina and the bee help sell the overall image layout – it was quite a challenge to find a macro photo of a bee that so closely matched the angle of her cheek and jaw.
Shameful confession time: I’d never seen any of Pam Grier’s classic 1970s blaxploitation features until only a few weeks before making these pieces. Of course I’d seen Quentin Tarantino’s love letter to her, Jackie Brown, and had enjoyed the Roger Corman saucy Roman smackdown Arena on some cheap DVD I’d picked up, but somehow I’d always left Coffy, Foxy Brown, Friday Foster and the likes on my watchlist. Finally picking up Arrow Video’s typically excellent Blu-ray of Coffy, I was knocked on my, as the Americans say, ass by the full-bore majesty of this incredible actioner. The terrific, efficient direction of Jack Hill offers the perfect stage for Grier’s wonderful performance that runs the gamut from regal self-possession, through radiant sexiness, all the way to ruthless vengeful violence. A clear, vibrant, anti-establishment plot, a colourful cast of supporting characters (most notably Sid Haig as a reptilian gangster), and some magnificently messy scenes of squib-laden gun battles, automotive destruction, and drag-out catfights add up to one of the most satisfying film experiences I’d had in some time.
I was compelled to put together a poster – I wanted something simple, vintage-looking, and, for extremely obvious and undeniably prurient reasons, a design that would seek to honour just how incredible Pam Grier looked in this film. Veering away from the release poster designs which foregrounded Coffy’s powerful, shotgun-toting path of revenge, instead, I wanted to illustrate how the character weaponised her charms in order to lull her opponents into a false sense of security, before dispatching them with righteous fury.
Using simple screenshots from the streaming version of the film, I first identified the scene where Coffy seduces the absurdly-dressed pimp King George and pulled two related shots. I then figured I’d need to fill the remaining space with a selection of the bastards Coffy would spend the 90 minutes or so taking down – I cascaded them in a loose vertical structure, arranging them around the tagline which I had clipped from a hi-res scan of the release poster and simply cropped and dropped in place. The layout of these elements came from simple trial-and-error. I knew I wanted the poster to look almost like one of the newspaper ads rather than a full illustrated poster, so decided to include a thick black border and black bar at the bottom where I would place the title and a small amount of other information. I wanted to include only a few key elements – the production company, the producer and director, Pam Grier, and the MPAA rating. All elements, except for Pam Grier’s name, were cropped and image traced from original elements sourced online. I knew I would be able to keep these less than uniform, as I had planned to use a Photoshop action I’d downloaded from Spoon Graphics which I’d been dying to try on the right project – this created a realistic, black-shifted, aged, messy 4-colour ink process. However, it didn’t process the photographic elements very well – I lost almost all of the nuance in the faces. So, I decided to use this only for the black ink text elements and the black frame – I created a high contrast monotone black-only layer for the ink process, and the colours were created utilising a standard halftone filter in Photoshop on a separate layer of the combined final photographic montage, with all black pixels removed after the fact.
A final pass of textures, including a further aging on the black ink elements, and the addition of a nice paper texture, and we were all done! Well, with this one at least – I just had to do something for Jack Hill’s follow-up feature Foxy Brown.
Foxy Brown‘s excellent, psychadelic opening credits inspired this colourful celebration of Pam Grier’s imcredible costumes throughout the film, again going undercover as a sexed-up and powerful woman who delves into the murky world of white drug dealers and pimps to exact brutal revenge.
Once I’d found reference pictures that covered the range of looks she sports throughout the runtime, and discarded those that didn’t meet the minimum requirements for clarity, these three images pretty much picked themselves. I’d originally envisioned full body images, like those scene in the credits dance sequence, but the majority were waist-up portraits, so that dictated the form. I wanted to have overlapping, colour coded stripes that would end with a single-colour image that would create a Grier-shaped end piece, before the next colour stripe took over. The credits scene involved 3 colours, so that’s what I wanted to do too – also, this meant I could play with the classic RGB 3 colour TV look, evoking the era, and using more than 3 images would have eradicated the long horizontal band that I wanted to form at least half, if not more, of the print.
Once I’d created my 3 images, I struggled with keeping the design as horizontal as I wanted. Shrinking the processed photographs meant losing clarity – some of this was intentional, to create a riso print starkness, but I still wanted the images to be legible and distinct. I also wanted the shirt to have a band of colour, rather than the chunkier, more maximalist designs I have created so far, so there was much push-and-pull in deciding how wide vs how tall to make the full shape. When the layout was finalised, I felt I had the balance roughly where I wanted it, but this taller band of red felt like wasted space. So, I pulled elements again from the release poster, bolstered others with typed text (the tagline is in a very nice font called Coolvetica), and used the image of Pam as a layer mask to create that end shape on the left, with the hair flick and insouciant hand-on-hip pose.
Hopefully these will serve as adequate tributes to, truly, one of the coolest screen presences I’ve belatedly discovered.
Toei Studios’ reigning queen of Pinky Violence, Reiko Ike, stars in Norifumi Suzuki’s infamous, overheated Jidaigeki classic of gambling, espionage, murder, revenge, and naked swordfighting. In contrast to Shunya Itō’s furious, near-contemporaneous FemalePrisonerScorpion trilogy (and Yasuharu Hasebe’s series capper), the thrills and spills on display here don’t carry quite the same message of righteous female empowerment, falling more into the more prurient end of the pinku spectrum of the era. But, that’s not to diminish the utter badassery and screen presence of the incandescent Ike, who cuts a swathe through the film and the series of miserable baddies that killed her detective father when she was a mere child. Emerging after 2 decades as a skilled gamber, pickpocket, and brawler, she navigates the underbelly of Tokyo with smoky eyes and a sly smile that disappears when it’s time to slaughter a dozen lackeys in the snow without a stitch of clothing. While in a separate subplot, Swedish exploitation star Christina Lindberg struggles gamely with her accent as a British dancer embroiled in a plot by the dastardly British to undermine the emerging Japan’s power, despite her romantic entanglement with a Japanese political activist. The film heads towards a shocking, somewhat blasphemous, bloody and oddly captivating full-throttle conclusion (mostly stolen from Meiko Kaji’s Lady Snowblood). It’s a heady stew of bad taste good times, anchored by one of the most charismatic performers of her era relishing the solo spotlight (Ike was more often paired with the intense Miki Sugimoto during this period).
Here are my two designs inspired by the magnificent 不良姐御伝 猪の鹿お蝶 (Furyō anego den: Inoshika o-Chō) a.k.a SEX AND FURY! A large format full-colour poster print, available at Etsy as a gallery grade, 36cm x 87cm giclee print:
You can also pick up a t-shirt, or A3 poster print, of this alternative black and white design over at Teemill, from another original photomontage layout:
Full Colour Poster Process
For this poster, I knew I wanted to use the infamous naked bath house sword fight as the key image. It’s the most iconic scene in the film, utterly ridiculous, moronically cool, and the perfect hook for the type of poster I wanted to create – as close a rendition as I could manage of the early 1970s Japanese exploitaion movie posters that didn’t hold back on the base-level thrills they used to hook viewers. However, my standard edition DVD is the only source I have available for any images for this film; high resolution digital images seemed scarce and while I believe there may be a Blu-ray release of Teruo Ishii’s sequel Yasagure anego den: Sôkatsu rinchi, a.k.a Female Yakuza Tale: Inquisition and Torture, I couldn’t find one for this. That meant that, no matter if I could pull images, there would be such pixellation that I would have to degrade the picture substantially to avoid this being visible at scale. The first task was screenshotting a section of the fight – the moment Ike jumps from the bath gave the clearest set of images. These were enlarged as best I could within Photoshop, cropped (leaving the unfortunate victim of the katana-slashing intact in one), and the sword replaced in all but one shot due to the motion blur rendering them all but invisible.
Next, these screenshots were laid out together, with the spacing between them planned as best as possible to show the movement. This started to determine the shape of the poster (highly unusual in Japan – most posters of these dimensions would actually be vertical, not horizontal). While I had thought initially that they could run across the bottom of a larger design, the lack of good quality material determined that I preferred to make this the centrepiece. There were a few readjustments before I struck in the idea of a 4-folded sheet of roughly 4 x A4 paper. The size felt right: a 30cm height would be feasible for the print quality. That led to the idea to actually add ‘folds’ to the final design, one of a number of elements that would help hide the deficiencies of the original images. I liked the idea of a ‘widescreen’ poster – this influenced the idea to have a border of some kind to help create a more horizontal look, to allow for the very wide, 10 screenshot montage to not look too out of place. In this new layout (which at this point had only plain black letterbox borders) the images took roughly half of the vertical space remaining. I’d screenshotted a striking close up of Ike’s face that felt to me as the natural choice for her ‘hero’ shot; I wasn’t sure how to use it, but by adding a white layer border it looked more intentional. By this time, I’d added the pink-to-yellow colour blend as a background. The choice was largely organic – I’d seen a similar fade effect in the background of numerous Japanese posters of the era, and the pink represented, simply enough, pinku as a genre. The yellow was both complementary, and allowed for the somewhat clumsy blood splatter to be visible. That red element was tricky. I had taken screenshots of the title screens to the film, snipped them, and run both through Illustrator to create vectors. I knew I wanted the titles in red and white, but the pink background made it difficult to read. Luckily, the solution matched the white border I’d chosen to add to Ike’s closeup. A comparable close up for Christina Lindberg seemed natural – after all, on the original release poster (and subsequent DVD and video releases), she’s actually featured far larger than the film’s actual star.
Basic elements in place, I started adding text. Again, I think the mixture of vertical and horizontal text would actually be highly unusual in a poster of this era. Ike’s name goes first, as vertical text is read right-to-left rather than left-to-right, although this change was made very last minute after I hired a translator from Fiverr to translate the tagline to the film. It, in the very blunt manner you’d expect, refers to ‘Sweden’s No.1 Porno Queen!’, Lindberg, and that ‘Japan’s Porn Queen Reiko Ike!’ answers her challenge. This, then, dictated the order of the main images. The rest of the tagline, which says something like ‘These two will fight elegantly, and gracefully make the flower bloom!’, was added to the lower part of the poster, in red to help with the colour balance.
Those border sections felt like they needed something additional – I downloaded a pattern maker from Adobe Stock and created a simple wave pattern that I felt evoked the period film trappings, and used the exact shade of dark brown of Ike’s hair as the dominant colour to try to ensure that it felt organically connected, and to evoke the narrower colour palettes of older posters with limited inking abilites. The dark blue was added purely to allow it to stand out, and to hopefully make some sense of the blue light flare that was in the best available close up I could source of Lindberg.
The importance of the Hanafuda cards – the gambling cards that carry the images of the deer, the boar, and the butterfly – was something I’d wanted to include. First, via a screenshot of the cards clutched in Ike’s father’s dying hand, but I didn’t think that it fit the layout I had to this point. I managed to find, on a US Embassy website of all places, a clear image of the cards on a plain background. I separated them, and laid them out in a space that had emerged to the left of the film’s title. Adding in the various logos that would somewhat allow this to pass as a genuine period poster, including the Toei logo in the bottom left and the registration mark in the bottom right, I felt the design itself was done.
To get a vintage print style, I first downloaded Studio 2am‘s Zine effect process, as I wasn’t sure where to start with creating a realistically aged print effect. Unfortunately, the dimensions of the standard version were too small. I retrofitted the various layers of filters and processes as best I could, most importantly a color halftone effect that helped to obliterate the pixellation of the source images. Among others, there is a sandstone texture, added noise, gaussian blurs, and finally the halftone effect, set to 4 pixels. This was then exported, and dropped into a new psd.
I stitched together 4 creased paper overlays that I found on Adobe Effects – black screens that contained realistic paper fold damage – and shaped them to cover the image as needed, before using the eraser to avoid contaminating the image too much. I set this as a ‘screen’ layer, and added one more, different paper texture effect to offset the lightening that resulted with some darker paper grain.
Finally it was time to set up the print layout – I’ve ended up with slightly bizarre final dimensions, but was unwilling to affect the specific halftone pixel size by reducing the final exported image to fit a print border/bleed. I decided to add the English text based on a book I have of Japanese cult posters, Tokyo Cinegraphix, and allow for a wider border across the bottom edge. Each poster in that book has a little information block regarding the year of production, Japanese, and English translated titles. The book series is excellent, and highly recommended!
Buy shirts at Teemill and giclee poster prints at Etsy!
My final poster design in the Female Prisoner Scorpion series is for director Yasuharu Hasebe’s only entry, and Meiko Kaji’s last outing as Nami Matsushima/Sasori/The Scorpion, Grudge Song. While it lacks the wild creativity of Shunya Itō’s incredible trilogy, Hasebe was no slouch – a veteran of Nikkatsu’s ‘borderless action’ yazuka movies of the late 1960s, including his remarkable Retaliation which featured Meiko Kaji in a supporting role, and 3 entries into Kaji’s sukeban series Stray Cat Rock. A sombre and fascinating coda to the wilder Itō pictures, this film allows Kaji to ground her portrayal of Nami more than at any other time in the run – even going so far as to find her a male love interest for the first time since the evil corrupt cop that sent her down the path of cyclical incerceration and revenge. The film even features fascinating visual callbacks to the first film in the cycle that evoke that relationship, deepening the drama and dourness when things inevitably go awry for our stoic heroine.
I’ve tried to capture that pared-back simplicity with a bold and stark design that incorporates a flower-shaped bloodstain – visually representing one of the more memorable kills in the series as Nami eludes capture by driving a flower into a cop’s jugular. The bloodstained fabric refers to that visual callback during Nami’s brief moment of physical intimacy she shares with the damaged anarchist she comes to trust enough to take to bed – a visual motif that in the original film also recalls the hinomaru flag.
Dead Penpal 