Barnabas In Burton by JNRedmon on DeviantArt (original) (raw)

In my opinion, Tim Burton is one of only 2 truly great visual artists working in mainstream film today (the other one is Tarsem). Ever since I was a little kid (when I started watching "Pee-Wee's Big Adventure" every time I went to my grandma's house), Tim Burton has been my idol. He's a talented filmmaker, a master storyteller, and an incredible artist. His work has been an inspiration to me for years, and yet surprisingly, I haven't made any real tribute to his work. Until this.

For the Dark Shadows contest, I decided to make a portrait of Barnabas Collins entirely out of little drawings of things Tim Burton has done. Within this portrait is at least one thing from every movie he's ever done. I even included stuff from his unknown early shorts, like "Houdini," "Doctor of Doom," and "Stalk of the Celery Monster." The only thing missing is "The Island of Doctor Agor" - for the life of me, I couldn't find any stills from that movie anywhere. I also included a ton of stuff from paintings and drawings that he's done. One of the problems with that, though, is that it might not be immediately obvious that I drew Barnabas. So I decided to give him some vampire fangs made out of Sweeney Todd's razor and Edward Scissorhands' fingers. I thought that would be pretty cool. My hope is that devoted Tim Burton fans will look this over and try to identify stuff (though that might be difficult, since my scanner possesses the magical ability to make everything I upload look even worse than it does in real life).

And that's one of the reasons I know I'm not going to do well in this contest - the picture quality is atrocious. And on top of that, it's just not that great in comparison to everyone else's. There are way too many super-talented people here. But I saw that Tim Burton is picking the winners, so I thought I'd give it a shot anyway.

So although it didn't turn out as well as I hoped, I wanted to finally make a tribute to all things Burton, and I hope you guys like it.