It seems that our friend Mike Mitchell had such a great time here in Austin a few weeks ago, that he has decided to come back for the closing night of his Gallery show. And with him, he is bringing 4 new portraits!

This coming Friday, May 24th, we will be throwing our first ever Closing Night Party. Same rules apply: We will begin the festivities at 7PM, with new art and free drinks, and it goes until 10PM. Incidentally, that means we will be closed to the public during normal business hours that day. Please contact us if you have any questions.

Sadly, I cannot reveal what the new portraits will be (what fun would that be?) but I can tell you that they will be limited.

Lastly, if there are any Gallery Pick ups from April that have yet to happen (Repo Man, Oblivion Vinyl and poster, etc.) keep in mind, the gallery is closed to the public officially on the 25th until our next show (of which we will have more information about shortly).

To clarify, the closing night party is Friday, May 24th. The last day of the show will be Saturday, May 25th from 12PM to 6PM.

See you guys on Friday!

You may have noticed the postcards we had on display at our last gallery featuring Tyler Stout & Ken Taylor, but if you are still in the dark, our next gallery show opening on April 26th, 2013 will be a solo show featuring art from the great Mike Mitchell!

The show opens on April 26th and will run through May 25th at the Mondo Gallery in Austin, TX. We will have an opening reception on Friday, April 26th from 7PM to 10PM with Mike Mitchell in attendance.

Stay tuned for more sneak peeks at work from the show as we get closer to the opening. For now, check out a great interview with Mike over at www.OMGPosters.com

Check out the video recap below from the opening night of our GAME OF THRONES gallery at SXSW!

MONDO: GAME OF THRONES GALLERY from Mondo on Vimeo.

Photo credit: Jack Plunkett

Hi guys. Mo here. Thank you to everyone that came out and made our GAME OF THRONES show a huge success. Thank you to La Condesa and Brewery Ommegang for the refreshments. Free, delicious beer will always attract the masses, but I’d love to think the art had something to do with the crazy turn out as well. Speaking of art, those of you who inquire about Bill Sienkiewicz’s missing piece, we are happy to report that it arrived safely today, and we will have it on display at the gallery until the end of of the show.

GAME OF THRONES closes tomorrow at 6PM, so if you are local and haven’t stopped by, don’t hesitate. We still have a few giclees and prints left. Get them before they’re gone, as most of these are Gallery Exclusives.

After GAME OF THRONES comes down, we have two days to change the gallery over to our highly anticipated TYLER STOUT / KEN TAYLOR duo show. We are so incredibly excited about this, but we get the feeling you guys might be more excited. In fact, there are rumors of some people camping out. I wanted to lay down a few rules about that so we’re all on the same page about the next few days. First, camping out is absolutely fine, but please be considerate to our neighbor’s property and to ours. Please do not litter, or leave a mess of any kind. We are going to try to have trash cans out to help with the cause, so please do your best to make sure all waste ends up in the appropriate place. Also, we ask that you do not park in the New World Deli parking lot or Hyde Park Gym parking lot. The kind people of Arrowhead Framing, Vino Vino, and New World Deli have been incredibly gracious about our openings in the past, but they have not been without complaints. Let’s try to perfect the art of overnights and work together to have a good time.

Second, and on a similar note, while we are expecting people to camp out and a huge turn out, we do not want to make our fans nervous about accessibility. Many people are concerned about our decision to release the DRIVE LP at the event. Only a portion of the pressing will be available on Friday. The rest will go online 3/22. Like with previous gallery shows, we anticipate some of the prints will make it online as well.

Tyler Stout and Ken Taylor will be in attendance on Friday. This is amazing news for countless reasons, and as rare as it is to get something signed by Tyler, almost none of Ken’s Mondo prints in circulation are signed by him. We understand all of the reasons you might feel inclined to bring all of your old prints to get signed, but we regret to inform you neither artist will be signing prints at the event. There simply isn’t space to accommodate the demand. We apologize for this inconvenience. But there is some hope!

Ken’s pieces from the gallery will all come signed. If you have something older by him you would like to get signed, he will have a booth set up at Austin Flatstock where he can accommodate. I think  he will also have some old stuff for sale, as well. Unfortunately, Tyler’s gallery prints will not be signed due to the timing of his arrival in Austin, but we have some good news. We will be hosting a signing by Tyler Stout on Saturday morning from 11AM – 1PM. Feel free to bring 2-3 pieces to get signed. We hope this makes up for any inconvenience. Lastly, we will also be open from 12PM – 6PM on Sunday 3/17, but we will be closed on Monday 3/18. We will resume normal business hours on 3/19.

Thank you so much for understanding. We have some of the best fans in the world and we look forward to seeing a lot of you this weekend.

We’re here. Tonight is the opening of our new exhibit, IN PROGRESS. The show finished and fully displayed. However, we have one more sneak preview to share before doors open tonight. Today, we have a look at an alternate design for Laurent Durieux’s CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON. See the art and read some commentary from Laurent below.

Laurent Durieux:

I actually had never seen any of the Universal Monsters movies before as, in Belgium, they are not so much engrained in our movie culture as it is in the U.S., so I came to  work on these 5 movie posters with a totally fresh eye. I found them truly moving and beautiful! 

When I have to come up with a new illustration for a movie poster, as it was the case for the UM show, I always try to take the movie from an angle as different and new as possible, which is not so easy as there is sometimes up to 70 years of iconography behind these classics! 

I am an illustrator and as such, I’d like to think of myself as a “story teller”. My aim is to be true to the film but also true to my emotions.

It’s very hard for me to come up with something I’m happy with if I didn’t feel anything for a movie, I guess it’s like that for most artists right? For instance, I think the reason why my “Creature of the Black Lagoon” poster wasn’t as popular as the 4 other ones is that, there is no emotion or pathos involved, it’s a 2D “graphic concept”…I’m not saying I don’t like the movie or the poster I did, but it somehow touched me less than the other 4 films and I suspect the collectors sensed it and prefer when I try to tell a story instead? Also I don’t think my style suits “witty concept” or “graphic ideas” posters so well the way Olly Moss’s or Jason Munn’s would for instance. I wish It did, sometimes, well c’est la vie…

Here are the different stages of elaboration of an image:

1. Quick sketch(es) of idea(s)
2. More refined drawing with addition of colours
3. Preparation of the layout with a collage of all sorts of documentation, screen grabs and drawings.  (Zita Johann’s arm comes from a vintage window display mannequin)
4. Inking of the final collage mainly on computer (I work with a Wacom palette) and also the old fashion way (on paper), I scan all the bits and pieces I have and paste them into a coherent whole, hence I rarely have a complete original.
5. Getting the volumes, shadows and light, colours in place with my hatching/counter hatching technique.
6. Finding the right typography and placement although I kind of know from the start where I will place it. My twin brother Jack, also graphic designer, usually handles that part for me.
7. Fine tuning of colours.

IN PROGRESS opens tonight, January 25th, at 7PM at the Mondo Gallery in Austin, TX and will be on display through February 23rd.

Today, we have a look at Jock’s line art for his WEST OF MEMPHIS poster. You can see the artwork and some words from Mitch Putnam below.

Mitch Putnam:

Jock is primarily a comic book artist, so he’s used to working in traditional mediums. He does a lot of physical sketching (mostly in ink) for almost every poster he works on. I really like his work in the show, as it not only shows his process, but also some of his alternate ideas, since he draws out even his early ideas on paper.

IN PROGRESS opens this Friday, January 25th, at 7PM at the Mondo Gallery in Austin, TX and will be on display through February 23rd.

Today, we have an exclusive reveal of Aaron Horkey’s beautiful LORD OF THE RINGS poster from MMMX last year. Getting to see Horkey’s original art in person is nothing short of breathtaking. There is not much else to say as the art truly speaks for itself. See the art and some words from Mitch Putnam below.

Mitch Putnam:

Aaron Horkey works almost entirely without the aid of computers. He starts with small pencil sketches, moves up to larger ink drawings, then traces out each color separation by hand. It’s a painstaking process (and one that takes seemingly forever), but the hand-rendered precision really shows in the final product. He’s part of a dying breed, and this exhibition showcases his process perfectly.

IN PROGRESS opens this Friday, January 25th, at 7PM at the Mondo Gallery in Austin, TX and will be on display through February 23rd.

As we mentioned yesterday, every day this week we will be providing a look behind the scenes leading up to the Friday opening of our new show, IN PROGRESS. Today, we have a look at the original pencil art for Jason Edmiston’s GO APE! poster from last year. See the art and some words from Jason below…

Jason Edmiston:

My “Go Ape” poster for Mondo and The Alamo Drafthouse is a direct homage to the original poster from 1974 distributed by 20th Century fox that advertised a movie marathon showing all five Planet of the Apes movies. My goal was to recreate the vibe and composition of the classic, while switching up a photo of a soldier ape for a tight illustration of General Ursus. I gathered reference of Ursus from internet searches, screen grabs, and toy photos, and drew a sketch in pencil at about a quarter of the size of the final painting. After I was happy with the composition, I scanned it in, and enlarged it in Photoshop, printed it out, and traced it on primed, stretched watercolor paper. then I painted it traditionally in acrylic, like all my other paintings. I painted a full value sepia underpainting, then followed with color washes, building up from medium values to darks, then finishing with lights and highlights. The text was done in Photoshop by Mondo’s Rob Jones.

IN PROGRESS opens this Friday, January 25th, at 7PM at the Mondo Gallery in Austin, TX and will be on display through February 23rd.

This Friday, January 25th, is the opening of our new gallery show, “In Progress.” This exhibit will feature the original artwork, concepts and line art for many of our posters. We’re crazy excited for this show and hope all of you appreciate it as much as we do. The amount of talent on display as we’re preparing for the opening is breathtaking. We thought it’d be cool to provide a few sneak peeks leading up to Friday, so every day this week, we will be displaying one piece from the show along with a small write-up from the respective artist here on our blog. First up, we have “THE IRON GIANT” by Laurent Durieux. You can see the art, as well as a blurb from Laurent about the piece, below…

Here’s what Laurent had to say:

Iron Giant is a great movie, so moving and funny at the same time. The friendship between Hogarth and the Iron Giant is epic and reminds me in many ways of one of my favourite movies, E.T. 

I am especially sensitive to how Brad Bird has used CGI in such a subtle way. The mix between the conventional “hand drawn” animation and the CGI is very coherent and smooth. That’s what I always try to achieve my posters, you know, finding the right mix between technology and art.

Re-interpreting another graphic style, like a cartoon for example, is very tricky, as I think there is always a risk of distorting the original intentions and aesthetics of the authors. In my opinion, very few artists succeed in doing so, that’s the reason why, in this case, I’ve tried to keep actual elements and characters of the film to a minimum.

I dig the colour scheme of the film, the indian summer feel to it, the vibrancy of autumn leaves, etc… That’s what I’ve tried to depict in my poster. I love how the colours interact with each other and the overall naturalistic feel with the flock of birds flying by, the sea on the horizon, the sun setting, the light house, etc. I’m also very pleased with the typography as well. My brother Jack nailed it in my opinion!

I think “Iron Giant” is a true family classic and I hope my poster did it justice. I will always be proud of this poster and it remains, to this day, one of my favourites. But the best of it all is that fans out there seem to love it as much as I do, which is, at the end of the day, my true reward!

IN PROGRESS opens this Friday, January 25th, at 7PM at the Mondo Gallery in Austin, TX and will be on display through February 23rd.

As some of you may know, Richey Beckett’s great piece for our current UNIVERSAL MONSTERS gallery show wasn’t in hand by the time doors opened last Friday. It has since been added alongside the rest of the show in all of its glory. We wanted to give you guys a chance to check it out in case you aren’t able to come down and see it in person. Richey was kind enough to provide us some photos he took while working on this piece and we’re happy to show them below.

Also, if you missed it, all original artwork from the show is now available online right HERE.