P4

Inspiration

The John Wick poster made me decide to use bright colours in with a bloody genre. The second poster (My Hero Academia) inspired the art style that I used, and also the two sides showing the opposing sides idea that I used.

Picture Options

1) This is a picture I took myself. I think this picture works well as the background for my poster considering it manages the two sided opposites effect without being edited. The problem with the image is that most of the image is made of water, which doesn't fit the setting or the tone of the story, which is why I decided not to use it.

2) This is a picture I took myself. If I use this image, I'd have to edit it so half is a different colour so that it works with the concept of my poster. The thing that makes me hesitate is the fact that the image is only the sky and doesn't include any land in it, which might make the poster look a little odd.

3) This is a picture I took myself. This image highlights the sun in the background. The reason I won't use it is because the objects and people in it make it worse as a background image. There also isn't enough of the sky in the image to edit into another image.

4) This is a picture I edited, both parts of the image I took myself. This has both the ground and the sky (plus a bit of sun behind the trees) so it works well with my concept. One problem is that the trees cover a lot of the sky, and take up a lot of the background, but overall I feel like this image works the best. Still, I might decide to use a different image later on.

5) This is a picture from google. This image is basically the perfect version of what I'm imagining, the problem is it looks fake. That could work well considering the abstract features of my poster concept, but I'm not sure if it would be better to use a real image instead.

6) This is a picture from google. This image works a bit worse than No.5, since it only has the sky and no ground, but I think the fact that it looks more realistic makes up for that. If I use this one, I might just edit in some ground to make it work better.

In the end, I didn't end up using any of these, instead I used this image as a background since I thought it would reinforce both the 1930s era theme and also the news aspect of the concept.

Character Images

This was my first attempt at drawing Jackson, the protagonist. The hat he wears is meant to be a mafia style hat from the 1930s, expressing the setting. His expression is meant to be evil and sadistic to reflect his character. At the moment I think the hat looks a bit off and his expression is almost too evil. The fact that he's looking down might make the poster a bit confusing.

I feel like this version works better, since it shows him looking up like I planned in the original concept. Again, his hat is a bit off, but I feel like it works better at this angle. To make him look less evil (again), I think I need to give him eyes. I don't want to change his expression since it reflects his personality well.

After sketching the images like this on Photoshop, I feel like it might be better if I overlay the sketches with one colour, and then go over the colour with lines to express the detail. I think that might also make the protagonist/antagonist more obvious.

Here is the idea mentioned above. I used blue to colour it, since I thought that would make it more obvious that he is the protagonist, especially if the antagonist is red since the colours are opposites. The problem is, I think if I use this, It will make the image itself look too bland since it really only uses three colours.

This is the gradient version of the coloured image, which looks good, but in the end colouring this one was too hard and wouldn't fit in with the rest of the poster

In the end this was the design I went for, without the colour on the inside. I also removed the white background from the inside, so that some of it would be transparent and you could see the background through it. I also shaded in the hat to make it fit the silhouette theme that I went for.

This is the design I used for Martino, the antagonist. It might look a little weird without eyes, but I'm not very good at drawing eyes yet, and I wanted to still with this style, so I decided to leave it as it is.

This is the final design for the protagonist and antagonist (plus title). I used the paint splatters since they easily present the fact that they oppose each other, along with the fact that they are at different points on the poster.

I also went through a few changes in the designs of the silhouettes inside the house at the centre of the poster.

This is one of the unused silhouettes I drew. The way I drew the silhouettes was either redrawing images on google, or taking pictures of people from google and turning them into silhouettes.

Old

New

This is the final version of the sitting silhouette on the 3rd floor that I redraw after the first version didn't look that good.

This is the final version of all of the silhouettes (house, people, city skyline, and crown) all in place.

Process

At first, I was planning on using this background with this house silhouette design I had created, but I decided the real life (but edited) background didn't work with the house in front of it.

My next idea was to take the silhouette design further, using it for both the protagonist and antagonist on the poster, both of which I drew myself. This is the protagonist, halfway through me removing the white colours on his face, to leave everything except the line work, the hair, teeth, and hat without a background.

This is the antagonist I drew, a little before I filling in his hair with white.

My next idea was to use paint splatters. When paint splatters, especially red paint, it can look like a blood stain, and since the concept for the poster is very bloody, I thought this would work well. It would also allow me to easily show that the protagonist and antagonist are opposing characters, through the use of red and blue paint. It would also have a double meaning as the protagonist is cold blooded (therefore the paint is blue).

Originally, I cut it out basically, since I was still using a plain white background and it didn't matter, but I cut it out properly later.

Then I put the profiles of the protagonist and antagonist in front of the paint splatters on the poster layout. I felt this was the best way to present it, especially considering the transparent faces (I had forgotten to fill in the antagonist's hair at this point though).

Next I added the title to the poster, putting it at the side and vertical, so that it matched up with the protagonist (the lying hero) and the antagonist (the honest villain).

I redesigned the house to improve a little on the original. The house went through many subtle shape changes as I worked on the poster.

I added the house to the poster, and with it the credit block. At this point I hadn't realised it was at 65% opacity, so it was hard to see, but I managed to notice and fix this later.

I added in a background and properly cut out the paint splatters. I went for an old paper texture, since I thought it would seem like a newspaper (since fake news is a major part of the concept), and fit with the 1930s time period of the film.

Next I coloured the letters by colouring the background behind them. Since the text has transparent parts, the colours managed to show through.

I decided that the text didn't look good enough, so I added more of an edge to the text, and I feel that helped make the colours stand out more. I put the red on the protagonist's side and the blue on the antagonist's side to convey the confusing nature of each's morals in the concept of the story.

At this point I decided to work more on the house, adding in red lines across the middle (I also added a red outline to the shape later). The point of this was to imply floors, and later on I added "bosses" or minor antagonists to each floor (including the roof section for the main antagonist).

I drew a crown based off a google image, and added a red outline to it to signal which side it belonged to. This crown represents the main antagonist, since he is the leader, the "king" of his part of the mafia.

This is an unused design for one of the minor antagonists that I created. Each silhouette was partially based on a google image that I took reference from and redrew. I also added the red outline to this image. The way I did the red outline without ruining the drawing was by duplicating the layer, and drawing the red outline on the original. Then I would merge the layers, and the red line would not cover the original drawing.

These are the character designs that I created for the minor antagonists, all in place.

I drew a basic henchmen design in the same way as all of the other silhouettes, and added them to the sides of each floor. I decreased the number as it went up, to create a pyramid appearance, and to imply the strength of each character (the less henchmen, the more dangerous). 

I ended up improving the design of the top minor antagonist, since the original design was a little bad.

I realised that the white edges still remained around the paint splatters, along with some background left around the faces of the protagonist and antagonist, and so I went around them with the paintbrush tool as 0% hardness to make the edges softer (or for the antagonist the rubber tool at 0% hardness). Also, the black background of this screenshot came from the city silhouette which you can see a better image of below.

I wrote fake reviews from film websites, and added them in to the sides of the poster.

This is the tagline I added to the top of the poster.

This is the updated credit block sine the first one broke. I ended up changing some names in this version as well.

I underlined both titles after realising they didn't stand out enough in the image, and in the final version I turned the rectangles underlining both parts of the title into complete rectangles filling in the background behind them (as seen below)

This is the final version with the title text highlighted properly with rectangles behind the text instead of underlining it.

One Effect

The effect that I think I made the best use of in my poster was the transparent backgrounds of my images (i.e. the protagonist and antagonist and the title text). Since the main part of my poster was the protagonist and antagonist, I needed a way to make them stand out and convey their characters. my solution to that was the paint splatters, which went behind the layer with the protagonist and antagonist, and which became their background. The thing about this effect is I had to decide how much to fill in with a colour, and how to fill in the background. For the protagonist and antagonist, I left their faces empty whilst I left the hair, teeth, and hats filled in with black and white. With the title text, I originally just drew around the letters on a layer below the text, but once I decided to make the title stand out more, I put in the rectangles behind them to make them one of the main parts of the poster.

The main part of my poster is really the silhouettes that I drew, but I don't think it counts as an effect and it's more of a stylistic choice.

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