Dark Night Marketing Imagery

At the good old Purple Rose Theatre Company, the apprentices put a show together every summer called Dark Night. It is a showcase of our skills, and just for a good time and a great creative opportunity. We wrote the scenes in the show and now we're just starting rehearsals. Here are some drawings I did to aid in our marketing campaign for Dark Night...enjoy! The hair/yarn motif ties in with a common thread (haha) in our show, and actually relates to the scene I wrote that will be featured in the show...

Ballpoint Pen in sketchbook and on scrap paper

May 2011

The Easter Beaver

During the run of the current show at the theater, a joke has continued to surface about the Easter Beaver (as opposed to the Easter Bunny). It’s a long story how the Beaver came about, and a hilarious one. We decided to write and illustrate a creation story, if you will, for the Easter Beaver, which we posted in the green room on Easter. I would like to attribute the writing to the fabulousness of Brett Radke and Katie Mack, and here are my illustrations as well:

Have you ever met a beaver and known him to be different? Let us begin the tale of the Easter Beaver. On this day of joy, you may have heard of a young man named Jesus, or even of a hoppity, egg-carrying bunny. But this story is slightly different. Although it might not move you to jubilant tears, we can promise you one thing: The True Tale of the EASTER BEAVER.

Unlike other beaver pups, this beaver was born with a scowl. While most beavers find pleasure in playing with wood or slapping their tails, this beaver did not.

The young pup would grumble inside, thinking, “Sigh. Woe is me. I know I’m not as happy as a beaver could be.”

Then one day, as the spring flowers were blooming, the young pup was grumbling through the forest, and he happened upon a sorely wounded bunny with pacifiers jammed in both nostrils, close by a scattering of brightly colored eggs. The bunny mumbled, in pain, “Damn those terrible twos!”

The beaver pushed past the bunny, unconcerned with the grumbles of a creature with such a pathetic wad of tail.

As he stood over the eggs a sensation tingled through his right leg, then his left, into his little beaver teeth and eventually into his beaver tail.

Like a magnet to a cork, the beaver had found his joy.

Then, the bunny reached his paw up, and with a death rattle on his breath, began to say, “But you’re not a bu---“…

The beaver stood, trembling, with the colored eggs in hand, and screamed to the heavens:

“I. AM. THE EASTER BEAVER!”

As if in agreement with fate, claiming their newfound successor, the eggs began to dance the G.M.E.D.O.O. The Great Macedonian Egg Dance Of Old.

THE END