You've seen the queen from Aliens many times before. But check out our exclusive first look at Mondo's new poster art, which aims to show you the ultimate version of the queen. Artist Jason Edmiston tells us his goal is to make it look as though the queen came and posed for him.


Edmiston's solo art show, called "A Rogue's Gallery," runs from August 23rd to September 14 at the Mondo Gallery in Austin, and celebrates "cinematic monsters and villains." Check out the full Aliens image below, plus some other (non-exclusive) images from the show.

Edmiston tells us the show goes as far back as some of the Universal horror movie monsters, but also includes a lot of more recent villains and monsters. His goal is to make it look as if the monsters or villains actually "sat for a portrait," he tells io9. "That's the concept behind the show."


In some cases, the images are actual portraits — like for his painting of Ming the Merciless from Flash Gordon, he actually tried to create an official state portrait of Ming, like one that Ming would hang in his receiving room. What sort of painting of himself would Ming want to hang? It would be "this giant opulent painting of himself."

And Edmiston tried hard to avoid any images that looked like they were painted from stock press photos. He used screengrabs and different images — but he also shot models in the poses he wanted the characters to be in (for example, when he was shooting David Lo Pan from Big Trouble in Little China.) His goal was to create images of these characters that "only exist in my brain."

Edmiston adds that his goal wasn't necessarily to do something new and off the wall, but to capture the definitive versions of these characters:

A lot of time, people will do portraits of pop culture characters and they'll try to get really quirky with them, and they'll be tongue-in-cheek. But I wanted to treat most of these portraits as pretty much, straight-up ultimate versions of these characters, as if they were going to be turned into stamps. You know what they did with the Elvis stamp? They made the ultimate 1950s version and the ultimate 1970s version.


Edmiston feels like, "If you're only going to buy one portrait of these characters, I want it to be this one."

"I describe my work as idealized realism," adds Edmiston. "It's not really photorealism, and it's not super-stylized." He likes to have bright, pumped-up colors and "in-your-face contrast," to capture what it would be like to meet these monsters and villains in real life. These characters always seem to be the most memorable part of any movie, and to have the best costumes and designs, and Edmiston wanted to capture that.


So here's the full image of Edmiston's alien queen, exclusively at io9:


And here are some more of Edmiston's portraits, which have been featured elsewhere already.

Kneel


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