Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus by Drew Struzan (Oct 28, 1998) ~ Color Comprehensive

I love Drew's work. It's magical.

I'm also a huge fan of seeing the behind-the-scenes development process of things.

In 'The Art of Drew Struzan' you can see this process play out as Drew showcases multiple comprehensives he drew for a film, followed by the finished piece. It's amazing to see how many iterations he sometimes did!

When Galactic Gallery listed these pieces separately back in 2020 I kept pointing everyone I knew towards them. Nobody was interested. So on a particularly good day, I decided to buy them both, a B&W and a color comprehensive :)

Both of these pieces were done for Ringling Bros as an audition for a circus poster. The design never went further than these two pieces. There is no 'finish'. I don't believe there are any further comps.

To me, this is an amazingly rare bit of insight into how Drew's mind works as he develops a piece. For many of his projects there would be a wall of 20 comps. Here, instead, we get a very quick project with two distinct steps, a finished B&W comp and a finished color comp. I say 'finished' here because these are more polished than usual.

The general construction and layout of these pieces is quite genius, being both a classic film poster and a circus poster, quite possibly the only circus poster Drew attempted. Circus posters are a dead branch of marketing art from the heydey of the circus, sadly mirroring the similar demise of painted movie posters. The idea of a movie poster artist like Drew taking a crack at a forgotten genre is wonderful to see!

The leaping tiger is a perfect place to start and a great example of what I'm talking about. Vintage circus posters were done at a time before cameras, when people could not look at a photo of a leaping tiger, and instead had to fake it. It created a unique style of "tiger" that was common in circus posters. Drew captured it here perfectly, extending it with his style and taste to be amazingly cool, and not so awkwardly 19th century. It still looks a little off from the reality we know today, but it is absolutely perfect when you view it as an ode to circus posters :)

And these pieces, his process, holy moly! These are like Level 10 'Highlights Magazine' material. I have lost track of the volume of differences between these two pieces. They seem so similar at first, but then you realize how everything changes! Nothing is the same. Some characters are replaced, others change genders or outfits. Some move elsewhere on the piece. Random accessories are added or removed. Try to keep track and you'll quickly surpass 50+ differences.

This is not someone tracing over their work, but reinventing it completely each time.

So the idea to have the pair of these, to see into Drew's process so succinctly? An exciting and wonderful learning opportunity.