Guybrush and Crew Beneath a Giant Skull — Print & Oil Painting

The lettering is part of the painting rather than something dropped on top of it. Deep purple capitals with pale outlines fill the upper third and lock into the shapes behind them, which tells you the title and the image were designed together. Take the words away and there would be a hole.

Under them, the mountain. A grey skull the size of a headland rises out of the middle of the canvas with jungle growing over its jaw, sockets empty, teeth broken into boulders. To its left a stone monkey head sits among the leaves with its mouth open as a doorway, painted warm ochre against the green. To its right a ship glows blue-green in a bay under a full moon, lit from inside like a lantern.

The foreground is people. A young man in a white shirt with a curling forelock holds a cutlass and stares out with his eyes very wide; a red-haired woman in a bandana stands at his left; a bearded pirate and a second man in a red headscarf fill the space between them; a pale monkey sits at the bottom edge. All of them are lit from below.

The palette travels across the canvas from hot to cold: violet, ochre and gold on the left, the grey mass of the skull in the centre, ghost light on the right. It is a poster before it is a scene, and it holds together because every element has been scaled to its weight in the story rather than to where it stands. From our Monkey island collection, next to the redrawn version of the same composition and the cover of the sequel.