Wes Anderson's The Amazing Spider-man

Well, where to begin with this one. It's inspired by the rumours that Wes Anderson was one of the front runners to direct the new spiderman movie. The idea really perplexed me, although I was also really excited. I'm happy with Mark Webb as directing choice, but I just really would like to see Wes Andersons take on Spider-man.

I had the idea to design costumes based on a Wes Anderson film for awhile now, but a few weeks ago I re watched this video and decided it was time to really try and design this.

It seemed more natural for Spiderman to wear some sort of street clothing rather than the original spiderman costume, I never really got that idea that a high school kid could just whip up a spandex costume in a matter of seconds, and that was even more apparent in Sam Raimi's first spiderman film.

So I think Wes would probably agree with my opinion.

I went through about ten different spider-man costume designs almost all of which were way too ugly to show to the world, until I figured out the right one.

I thought adidas shoes were a must for spiderman to wear.

Green Goblin was really fun to design. First off the original green goblin costume in particular is really just a ridiculous costume, I mean how can a person be scary when they're wearing nothing on the bottom except cheap halloween costume boots and pair of purple underwear? I decided to highlight that ridiculous aspect by adding a blazer. I really thought of a mix between William Defoe's Green Goblin, and his character Klaus from A Life Aquatic. I think the two merged pretty nicely.

Then I decided to do the background which really went through a ton of different ideas. The characters were drawn and colored in a day or so but the background took awhile to get right.

I first planed on just two different colors overlapping behind each character (I really should have saved an example of this) but then I decided to look over at Eric Anderson, and Ian Dingman's Criterion covers for Anderson's other films.

The city background idea really came from the Royal Tenenbaums here, which is really a beautiful cover design.
I made the background fairly two dimensional which is a really fun way to draw sometimes. My plan really wasn't to mimic Eric Anderson's art but rather to give tribute. My plan was really to mix his style with my own, similar to what I did with my Basquiat drawing but with less dedication.

I decided to make the horizon line close to the top of the image rather than somewhere in the middle, really to keep in line with the covers for tenenbaums, Life Aquatic, and Bottle Rocket. The city was crazy fun to draw. My favorite part is the little smoke stack next to the oscorp logo, not sure why but that was a fun one to add. And then of course the cola sign.

What I ended up running into trouble with were the color scheme for the buildings street and skyline. This went through a few stages. Originally I had the Spiderman Logo in bright yellow, since it seems like that's the classic Anderson Font color (although he actually uses a lot of colors)

But after browsing through a few color options the purple and yellow skyline really stood out to me. After that I decided to look through a few vintage Spider-man colors, the trend I noticed was that yellow skylines were pretty prevalent, and with nearly every yellow skyline came red text. So I added the red Text.

The next thing I was having trouble with was what to do to try and explain the high sky level, and what to do with all the negative space. So I looked at some of Ian Dingman's art (which is really some awesome stuff)

This one in particular made me feel more safe about just turning the negative space into a street.

So here you have it, The Amazing Spider-man. A film by Wes Anderson.
I have a bunch more character designs already drawn out so I'm thinking of doing a Fantastic Mr. Fox like movie poster thing, with a poster featuring each character. (Mysterio, Doctor Octopus, and Sandman are fully finished designs, and there are a few in progress designs for Kraven the hunter and The Vulture.)