Le Roi en Jaune: The Poster I Drew for the Play That Doesn't Exist That I'm Not Sure Was Ever Used

    Back in 2017, Dennis Detwiller, of Arc Dream Publishing, asked if I could do an Art Deco 1917-18 poster for the King in Yellow play. This was at the same time I was working on the King in Yellow Tarot Deck for them. I love working in different art styles. In fact, I love it a lot more than working in realism, but those jobs just don't seem to come my way. This blog post will just be a run through of the course this project took.

   ▼ Well, it starts with sketches and, right off the bat I wanted the character Demoiselle Jeanne d'Ys to be in the poster and, right off the bat I got her all wrong. 

    ▲ So, Demoiselle d'Ys is supposed to be a Breton woman living in 1573. She is described as such:  "Her lovely head with its dark curly hair was crowned with a headdress which set all doubts as to the epoch of my own costume at rest. Her slender figure was exquisitely set off in the homespun hunting-gown edged with silver, and on her gauntlet-covered wrist she bore one of her petted hawks."

▼ Well, I had no idea what a Breton woman in 1573 looked like, and I still don't know what a Breton hunting gown might look like. Tradtional Breton costume does indeed have silver designs and edging, though:

    So, I was a bit lost as far as the Demoiselle d'Ys concept was concerned, so I began looking more towards a design that featured a woman in lamentation- hence, the tomb sculpture studies you can see in the sketches. I was pretty sure I wanted the pale mask of the King in Yellow to be like one of those Greek theatrical masks.

An attempt at drawing Demoiselle d'Ys.

  ▼ I eventually repurposed the lamenting woman in the second page of sketches and my concepts for Demoiselle Jeanne d'Ys in the Lovecraftian cookbook, Necronomnomnom:

"Gin and Miskatonic" from The Necronomnomnom

The Cake in Yellow, from The Necronomnomnom

   ▲ Yeah, I figured any inaccuracies in the depiction of d'Ys could be forgiven, since she's just this little side drawing on one of the pages.

   ▼ On to concept number two, where I've ditched d'Ys and gone with the lamenting woman, based mostly off of this tomb sculpture from the St. Joseph Cemetery in Cincinnati, OH.

     ▼ This version isn't Art Deco at all. It's more reminiscent of Symbolist artwork, which I adore.

   ▲ So, that didn't go anywhere. I like the image well enough, but it wasn't a fit for what the client was looking for.

   ▼ Next was a concept sketch where, looking at it now, I'm not sure what I was going for. I use my sketchbooks as journals, and I can usually look at a page or drawing and remember where I was and what I was doing and thinking. This sketch, though. I must have just been doodling. Just throwing stuff at the wall to see what lands in nice chunky clumps. Also on the page, we see another tomb sculpture study, some floral border work- probably from Walter Crane, and a study of pokeberries.

   ▼ Okay, now here I had landed on what would eventually be the final drawing, still with an undeveloped Yellow Sign.

   ▼ Just a bit of Louise Brooks, and the sketch is ready to send to Dennis.

   ▲ With this sketch approved, I start with a base digital drawing. ▼ By this time, I had settled on a design for the Yellow Sign, which you see at the bottom....in black. 

It created my own version of the Yellow Sign to be used in Arc Dream's King in Yellow Tarot, because I didn't want to re-use Kevin Ross' version of the Yellow Sign:

Kevin Ross' Yellow Sign

 ▲  The Ross version is, I think, owned by Chaosium, but I also wanted to try and create my own. The only mention of any sort of description in Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow is: "I opened the box. On the pink cotton inside lay a clasp of black onyx, on which was inlaid a curious symbol or letter in gold. It was neither Arabic nor Chinese, nor, as I found afterwards, did it belong to any human script." So, to me, it has to have a Westerner's passing notion of an Arabic or Asian character, and it also can't be simply described with shapes- otherwise the narrator would have just said as much. I also wanted to come up with a design that was easily drawn, since it would appear over and over.

Kurt Komoda's Yellow Sign

    ▲ Well, I may not have nailed it, but I've been using it ever since, in just about every project I've worked on.

   Anyway, back to the poster. The ink version got approved, I think- I can't seem to find the original emails between me and Dennis. It mayyyy have just been he liked the pencil and said go with it, and I just sent him my finals. I don't recall any tweaks or changes. What I did though, however, is just create a whole bunch of variations ▼:

   ▲ So, the one that was selected was bottom row, right (and also as the main image of this blog post). That was back in August of 2017. The Delta Green: The Conspiracy Kickstarter, which included the release of the King in Yellow Tarot, didn't complete (is that the correct term?) until July of 2024. Pretty sure the poster isn't in any of the books included with that, so I'm not sure what happened to this at all. It may not have been used. That happens some times. Oh well, you have seen it here. Bye!

EDIT 2024OCT04 1527 EST: I was told that the poster appears in Arc Dream's Delta Green: Impossible Landscapes!