Poon Tang Chain Gang

I was given a task a few years ago by some teammates of mine to create a banner for the Poon Tang Chain Gang. I'm really not at liberty to describe what the Poon Tang Chain Gang was, though the name is pretty self-explanatory as to what it represented. Suffice to say that we all know what poon tang is and we all are familiar with a chain gang. You should be able to figure most of it out from that.

I dove into my task with gusto and in a short while came up with a basic concept for the banner. It would be three men in chain gang clothing being pulled along by a beautiful woman. The men would be chained together and the woman would have a hold of their chain. The three men would be representative of the three sides of a well-rounded man and would take the form of Clint Eastwood, Ghandi and Curly from the Three Stooges.

I made a few more detailed concept pieces of the woman before letting the men see the idea.

Without going into too much detail here, the men hated the idea. They felt it was too negative... though they did like the faces I was working on for the three men.

To address the complaint that the piece was too negative I suggested that instead of being dragged by the woman, the three men could be escaping from the woman whose home would be represented by a large vagina.

In a bolt of brilliance one of the men suggested that instead of three men we should consider one three-headed man. I really liked the idea and went back to work, generating two new concept pieces, which you can see to my left.

I presented the two new pieces to the men and they picked what they liked from each one. Now we seemed to be getting somewhere! I then took their suggestions and consolidated them into a new piece, a hybrid of the previous two.

I did this one on art board and spent considerably more time on it than the previous concepts, I made it a lot larger and more detailed than the two previous pieces, but I still worked the details up in pencil. I didn't want to do anything more permanent until I got the final "buy off" on the piece from the men. They would be making the final decision, not me.

To get a digital version of the artwork I scanned the pencils in two passes and pasted them back together in Corel Painter. Using the Corel Painter trace feature I inked the design in using my Wacom tablet. I then used Painter's natural media watercolors to finish the piece. The final touch was provided by two very nice fonts I found on the Internet.

From start to finish it took me about a month to complete this piece. We had the final product printed out on canvas as a three by four foot banner. A one and a half inch wooden pole used for staking trees was nailed to the white area on the top and bottom of the illustration. Upholstery tacks were used as studs to decorate the top and bottom and to keep the weight off the nails attaching the poles. It was topped off with a nice thick chain at the top to hang it from. The result was really stunning and looked much nicer than I imagined it would. Unfortunately the resulting piece was destroyed by fire less than 24 hours after being completed. The artwork obviously still exists, but it is no longer a banner and no longer represents any team or organization.