TOS retro poster series

Starting this month, Quantum Mechanix in the US, and Pyramid in the UK are releasing a series of new TOS retro style posters from artist Juan Ortiz. For the next twenty months (!) they will be releasing sets of four. StarTrek.com have posted an interview with Ortiz explaining how the project came about:

It started with just three posters. I was just doing these for myself, not really thinking about making any money off of them. I liked how they looked and had fun creating them, so I figured why not do more? Even though I had majored in editorial illustration in college, I never really got to work in that field and these posters sort of filled that gap for me creatively.

After I made about 30-40 of them, I showed them to a few professional artist friends of mine and they all insisted that I should have them printed. I had worked as a product designer for Disney and Warner Bros., so my first instinct was to acquire the license and maybe print out a set of postcards or something. I contacted CBS and fortunately for me, the response for the posters was a good one. We decided, however, that having some of the CBS partners create the products would be a better way to go. Up until now, though, I had a tough time believing that it was all really happening. Hopefully the fans will appreciate the effort I made.

Here are the first four and Ortiz's comments on their designs:

The image is a stylized version of the patch worn by the doctor in the episode, I tried to give this poster an old Playbill look.

In drawing the character Edith Keeler, Ortiz went with "a '70s/'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' approach." The Beatles' Yellow Submarine was and still is a big influence in much of his work.

Ortiz wanted to be sure to credit not just the lead actors, but the writers and director as well. He says, "They are, after all, the creators. I'm just interpreting their words and visuals in a different format."

The look here is Grateful Dead-esque. "I knew that I wanted to create a black-light poster for this series, and naturally, "The Way to Eden," with its hippie theme, seemed perfect,"