About this poster

The approach for this Dirty Heads poster was a bit different than the ones I’d done in the past. Normally I would start off with some sort of inspiration from the city or trying to think of something clever to do with the band’s octopus character, but from the beginning, I knew I wanted this one to be a tribute to my friend Brian Ewing. Brian was a fellow poster artist and someone I would talk to on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. Like most other poster artists that started in the mid 00’s, I was a fan of Brian’s work, and really excited when he reached out to me, just to say hello and throw some words of encouragement my way. That led to a collaboration on a shirt for his Ghost Boner character and years of me texting him whatever stupid idea would pop into my head. Brian was also a long time collaborator with Dirty Heads and had kind of made it his trademark to make a mermaid (most of the time a green one) as the focus of his posters. This is the first summer without a Dirty Heads poster from Brian, so I thought illustrating a mermaid in his stead would be a cool way to pay tribute to my friend. I reached out to the band and their merch company and everyone agreed on the direction as a way to remember Brian. Once that was settled, I reached out to Andria (Brian’s fiancee) to get her blessing, so that she knew it was coming from a place of love and respect. She was very sweet and said that she loved the idea and that paying tribute to him through a poster is the kind of thing he would have dug. From there I just had to figure out what the hell I was going to do with the mermaid. After a lot of dead ends, I was getting pretty frustrated. I knew I wanted to incorporate some of the local fish into the artwork (because fishing is such a big thing in the area), but was still stuck on what to do with the mermaid. I went down the path of trying to make it have the feeling of old matchbook art, but that got me nowhere and every idea I had seemed to have been done by the band already. Then my daughter was playing old videos on her phone one night, and kept giggling at one of my mom singing Cher songs and dancing through her kitchen while she was baking cookies. My mom’s always been a huge Cher fan, so hearing her belting Cher tunes was a pretty common thing while I was growing up. For whatever reason though, hearing it this time made me flashback to the Cher movie “Mermaids,” and the film poster with all of the characters sitting in a bath tub. There it was. I took that idea, added a sort of Betty and Veronica pose to it, and that’s the poster. Hope you guys dig it. There’s one other small nod to all of the Ewing Fiend Club members out there hidden in the poster, so see I you can spot that. Be good everyone and have a great show!

- RB