Thunderbirds - The Motion Pictures!

As you can tell from an earlier post, I spent a lot of the first few weeks of lockdown creating cinema posters for the Doctor Who episodes that had been picked out for the mass tweet-a-longs. Haven't check the exact number but I did quite a few - including some classic series ones.

During that time, I felt I needed a break from Doctor Who. Yes, the creative juices were still flowing but I just needed to do something a bit different.

I'd just acquired the blu-ray of the original Thunderbirds TV series and was cherry-picking my favourite episodes. One of the many comments levelled at the show was how much like mini-movies each of fifty minute productions were. Indeed, there are some that even have very similar plots to later movies. So I started doing period film posters for some of them. 

Here they are:

Trapped in the Sky

The poster is based on one for Airport 1975 - the second film in the Airport series. The Fireflash that replaces the jumbo jet of the original is actually some cut-out and flipped artwork from an old Japanese model kit box. I had to 'reverse' the lettering on the side of the fuselage. It wasn't until I'd posted it on Twitter that I realised that the Fireflash lettering wasn't actually on the original aircraft. 

Operation Crashdive

This one is based on the poster for Airport 1977 - the third film in the increasingly desperate Airport series. In that film, a jumbo jet crash-lands in the sea (in the Bermuda Triangle of all places) and sinks to the bottom. The crew and passengers survive as the plane remains airtight. It's almost the same scenario as the episode 'Operation Crashdive'. So the choice of film/poster was a no-brainer. The artwork on the original is iconic and I had fun recreating it in photoshop. In this case, finding an image of Fireflash that was the same angle as the original sunken aircraft was difficult. There are very few promo images of it from the original series and I couldn't screengrab an image of it from the blu-ray as I didn't own a blu-ray drive. Instead I found a photo of the original Japanese Fireflash model kit. A few tweaks here and there and it looked okay - especially darkened and tinted blue/green. I think this is probably my favourite of the four posters.


City of Fire

This one was another obvious choice. No prizes for spotting the iconic poster for The Towering Inferno. I needed an image of the burning Thompson Towers (no relation). Again there were no suitable production stills so I had to create it in Photoshop. Luckily, the building is a simple skyscraper and building it in PS was comparatively straightforward. I distorted it and surrounded it with plenty of fire and smoke. It surprised me that it looked pretty authentic looking if a little stylised. The head shots of the family are simple pics taken off the telly and filtered to look more like artwork. I had a bit of fun with the words on this one. I can't help doing that. Please forgive me! 




The Perils of Penelope

I couldn't get the idea of doing a very sixties one for this Lady Penelope-centric episode. Barbarella was a no-no so I went for the much-maligned 1966 movie Modesty Blaise - a European film based on a British newspaper comic strip about a freelance lady spy. The poster is very sixties and is an art-based collage of images of Blaise - so it was a straight-forward task to create a similar design using Lady P - made all the more easier thanks to the fact she wore so many colourful dresses and that there are a lot more production stills of her than there are of Fireflash. I like the look of this one. Very sixties. And it's set off by having an off-white background instead of just plain white. 




Here's some of the textless artwork from the above designs.

And here are the originals:

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Two Mandrel Annuals and a Giant Robot One...

I did a cover for a Mandrel annual some time ago. It was based on the 1979 Dalek annual but replacing the Daleks in the original artwork with Mandrels. When I retweeted it as a "Goodbye Twitter" tweet, I received a lot of positive comments about it including suggestions that I add it to the designs for journals that I have on RedBubble. (Here's the link)

I'll admit that the whole concept it amusing but I wasn't too happy with it as it used a lot of the artwork from the genuine cover. I'm never happy when I'm bastardising other artist's work - however old. Despite, I decided to follow the suggestions and add it to the RedBubble portfolio. 

Alas, I discovered that the original PS files for it had gone the way of several months worth of work when my PC died in late 2019. I should've left it at that but I decided to redo it anyway. I also did a version of the original annual's back cover too. Earlier RedBubble journal designs feature a textless version of the cover art on the back. In my silly head, I thought the extra effort would redeem my use of the original artwork on the cover. 

So taken with the design, I decided to do another couple of annual covers - another Mandrel one (based on the 1976 Dalek annual) and a K-1 - Giant Robot annual (based on the 1983 K-9 annual). Although copies of the original designs, these are original photo-montages and don't use any of the originals' artwork. I even did another back cover for the K-1 annual. 

K1 Annual 1983

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Old Doctors, New Annuals...

Here's a selection of new annual covers using the classic Doctors. Each of the covers is based on the design for that year. 

I did this as a belated follow-up to the popular thirteenth Doctor on classic annuals that I did a few years ago. The link to them is here. 

Surprisingly, I haven't received any trolling from the so-called 'NotMyDoctor' faction this time. 

Well, not for these anyway... 

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Thank you.

A Quick Message...

Hello.

It's me...

Doesn't time fly when you're having a lockdown?

Yes, I know I haven't updated the blog in around three months but there's been a world-wide pandemic and things start playing on the mind of a depressive. I shan't go into details. That's the last thing you want from a blog about faux cult TV merchandise. Needless to say, I'm slowly but surely sorting things out and today is the day I update the blog with all the lovely things that have been my therapy during the break.

It doesn't help my anxiety that Blogger has changed the interface for uploading content. I've now the added task of trying to find the right fonts/colours/layouts to maintain a visual continuity. This irritates me no end. I spent most of last night re-formatting all of my most recent artwork/designs to make them blog-friendly. Today I log onto Blogger and find everything's changed. It still irritates me now as I type this in order to get it off my chest. 

As I think about Blogger's rationale, I come up with the theory that someone at the head office needed something to do during lockdown so spent the past five or so months coming up with a new design for it. They did that. I did Mandrel annuals and Thunderbirds film posters... Each to his own.

I'll start uploading the new stuff later today. Just need to have breakfast and answer some emails (It's Monday and I seem to be popular). 

See you soon.

Doctors Assemble - Profile Pics!

These are the original widescreen versions of the profile pics that I put together for each of the Doctor Whos as featured in the 'Doctors Assemble' video written by James Goss and produced by Emily Cook. 

I hope you like them.

Thank you to Emily for asking me to do them in the first place. 

If you've enjoyed this or any of my other stuffs on either this blog or my Twitter feed, then you might like to by me a coffee. Unfortunately, due to current government restrictions this is impossible at the likes of Starbucks, Costa or the Greasy Spoon cafe on the corner. But you CAN buy me a simulated one via my Ko-fi page. It's so easy and there's also a special gallery of my best stuff you can peruse to save wading through all the mediocre shit on my actual blog. Thank you and say stafe.