False Starts : Gōds

I've always been interested in the Greek Gods of the Pantheon ever since seeing the movie Clash of the Titans as a kid. To me they were like super heroes and I'm sure a case can be made that there's parallels between DC comics characters, but that's for another time. But at one point in 2009 I was batting around ideas for some new promo postcards. A lot of time I'll get ideas and they'll snowball and snowball to a point where I'm either forced to reel them in or I get intimidated and just scrap them altogether. Growing up I also collected baseball cards and I loved the checklist cards and I also liked when fast food places offered collectible items on a time released basis or had different ones at different establishments. I think the Great Muppet Caper glasses were like that and I found it exciting when a new one came out, because it was exactly that, NEW. Im sure at some point before a new glass was released I had seen each one on an ad or poster, but it was a whole other thing when it was physically in front of you.

But for my promo idea I wanted to pick a small group (mostly because this would get super costly) of companies and art directors I REALLY REALLY wanted to work for and over the course of a year - one every month for 12 months, send them a postcard depicting a different God of the Greek Pantheon. The first one would be oversized and have a checklist. There was a couple reasons behind this, first because as stated above I liked checklists for trading cards and the idea of collectibitity , and second because I hoped it would indicate to the art director that more were to come and not to throw it away. The plan was to send them in alphabetical order, although maybe over the time I would mix it up....and I really hoped that the art directors would look forward to getting new ones...my devious side even toyed with the idea of withholding a new card one of the months with the hope it would bum them out and then they would feel relief when they started showing up again....but that was probably giving myself too much credit... So first up would be Aphrodite

Knowing if other work came in I might get overwhelmed I set out to get as many final pieces done as I could before getting them printed. This is where the intimidation began to creep in because I knew if for some reason I burned out it would make me look really bad....but over time I sketched ideas for the different characters and worked on finals...

One of my favorites was Poseidon and I also worked out how I would deal with the back of the cards - a little history about him, kind of like the bio cards on the back of G.I. Joe and Transformers toys.

Who knows maybe I'll revisit this idea - always thought it would be cool to do a series of art prints as well.....