Death Trap - Finished

Death Trap- 11' x 14" digital and graphite by Greg Newbold

I posted the full value drawing for this piece a few days back. It will be reproduced as a poster and playbill cover for a production of Death Trap this coming season at Pioneer Theatre Company. I have been working on the final art the last couple of days and just finished things up. I decided to keep the background relatively unsaturated to create contrast and also to allow the background elements to recede. I really like how this turned out and in case you were curious, I painted it digitally using Photoshop.

Death Trap- Preliminary Drawing

Once again, I am doing a couple of posters for our regional playhouse Pioneer Theater. Last year I did work for A Christmas Carol: the Musical and this year I have agreed to do two new posters. The first is for a murder mystery called Death Trap, the 1978 thriller by Ira Levin who also penned the creepers Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford Wives. The plot revolves around washed up playwright Sydney Bruhl who is approached by a former student Clifford Anderson to read a new play he has written. The play turns out to be fantastic and Bruhl hatches a plan to kill Clifford and steal the script for his own. Many plot twists ensue and the ending is quite a surprise. The weapons in the drawing represent the collection of stage props that decorate one wall of Sydney's house and are also used to knock off the main characters. I wanted something that was ambiguous enough to not give away anything but mysterious enough to draw in the viewer. As soon as I get sketch approval I will move to finish on this one.