Happy Halloween! After the temporary hiatus and the cathartic Real Talk blog post, we are excited to be back in action making things and spreading general trivia knowledge to the masses. Although this poster has internally been a long time in the making, we are very excited to celebrate such a spooky season by festively introducing the next installment of the Alphabet Poster series: Mythical Creatures.
We teamed up with friend, illustrator and collaborator Scotty Reifsnyder for this bad boy and it is one of our favorite releases of all time. We have been a long time fan of Scotty's work and it was such a pleasure getting to be a part of and see such an amazing project come to life over the last few months. You can check out more from him on his Dribbble, Twitter, or Website. Amazing stuff over there.
The Mama's Sauce Mythical Team!
To help us bring in this momentous occasion, our friends over at our favorite ink slinging shop, Mama's Sauce, decided to channel their inner mysticalness and dress up as some of the lineup for Halloween!
Making of the Mythical Creatures
It wasn't all just fun and games for this here poster. Around 2 years ago, when Scotty and I started ideating around this idea, we had a ton of fun directions to go in. As you can see in the sketch below, early in the process of making this poster, we toyed around with the idea of putting these characters into picture frames. This idea was meant to be a little reminiscent of a Harry Potter picture frame wall that showcased snapshots of these elusive creatures nobody has ever seen in real life.
Sadly, we had to ditch the frame idea because it became pretty apparent that the design might become a little too busy for a poster with 26 illustrations and captions. We didn't want the monsters to get lost in the frames, so Scotty decided to tackle the creatures in a more straightforward fashion.
Regardless, the illustrations came out amazing and every character has their own little personality and quirk. The Imp is one of my personal favorites. He is a mischievous little creature and Scotty has him stealing money from a poor New Jersey resident's wallet.
Writing fun facts for this poster proved to be quite an adventure. This is for multiple reasons but the biggest one is that the characters in this poster don't actually exist (or do they...), so finding legitimate facts about fictitious material is pretty touchy. We did our best to not step on our own toes, but this is all folklore so we like to think that popular opinion rules.
For instance, fairies are magical, humanoid beings who are known for their mischievous and sometimes malicious nature. They will often use their words to confuse and mislead but they can be outwitted for it is said a fairy is incapable of telling a lie.
Or since it is Halloween, you should probably be on the lookout for the Headless Horseman. Of the many tales describing the headless horseman, none are quite as grim and disturbing as the Irish dullahan, or "dark man." Galloping through the night and wielding a whip made of a human spine, the dark man claims his victim's life by simply stopping to call out their name. I suppose you can't really defend against that. Bottom line, if you see a guy on a horse at any time, run.
Cha-Cha-Changes
The 55 Hi's shop is proud to announce a number of new changes! One of the first exciting moves we are making is we are now offering new sizes and color variations through our newest non-human team member: Shakakana (Shak for short).
Shak is an Epson 7890 Fine Art Giclée printer that will allow us to start offering posters in different sizes and colors to give everyone a little more variation in old and new releases from 55 Hi's.
We have received a lot of requests over the years for prints and designs that people love but haven't been the right color or size for their room. We have always wanted to accommodate these requests but the largest problem has always been cost and minimum quantities for screenprinting new designs.
Typically when you screenprint something, you pick one size and one color to print because you need to reach a large quantity of any one design to make it worth your while for setup, ink mixing and screen preparation. This has always proved hard for us, because we wanted to offer more things more often, but every new design triples or quadruples our upfront cost if we try to offer more than one variation. That's why in the past, we have resolved to offering one size in one color for all our releases.
After some careful consideration, we decided the best course of action was to move forward offering both printing methods. The Giclée printer will give us the opportunity to offer new designs, more often and at a better price while still retaining a fine art museum quality print. Screenprinting will be a great avenue to continue utilizing specialty printing methods while still retaining our Limited Edition runs of special designs.
So, if you have some time, take a look around at all the new variations and fun color alternatives we now offer. There is so many more things in the pipeline now that we have Shak. We can't wait to share.