Calvin Bauer Movie Poster

(Finally able to upload this and away from the brink of potential hard drive disaster.) So I did a poster for David Cronenberg's Videodrome, and wanted to capture the iconic flesh/videotape combination that embodies the general theme and feel of the film, but without directly copying the image from the movie. I mostly used the Blob Brush, for all of the fleshy parts, and the rectangle/circle/pen tool for the videotape itself. The fonts used were Bebas Neue for the main title, downloaded from dafont.com, and See You At the Movies for the slug (also dafont). I ended up using a TV static texture overlay for the main title (from freeimages.com) and a subtle cloth texture on the tape. I wasn't really able to render all the guts-ish parts as well as I'd hoped to, as vectors just end up looking too smooth and don't intigrate very well with one another (but maybe that's just my lack of experience), but I think for the general feel of the piece it turned out ok. I was playing around with the tv texture and tried to make it go across the entire poster, but it ended up muddying it up and flattening it so I ended up keeping it just in the text. I also used Kuler on several occasions in order to find an appropriate color for the main title. I think that's about it! I'm relatively happy with how this came out and I'm thinking about redoing it someday, maybe in photoshop.

Hey everyone~ I edited the illustration! Looks way better now. Thank you for the critiques-- it helped so much.

Frankenstien's Army

So this is my movie poster for the 2013 indie horror film Frankenstien's Army. If there is one thing I've learned in life, it's that nothing quite forces you to tap into your hidden potential like putting 14 hours into a piece 36 hours before it's due. This piece was a pretty even spread of the Pen tool, pencil tool, shapes tool, transparency, textures and tears. The cluster of bodies was made exclusively with Pen Tool, while the dangling feet were drawn and then refined with the Pen. The textures were a split between the clipping method and just outright using textures after I manipulated them in Photoshop. Fonts came from Germanic Medieval fonts (since the German war machines in WWI and 2 sought to use archaic fonts to appeal to a sense of noble history in their propaganda) .


For the most part this came out how I imagined, except I was unable to create a fully illustrated creature crawling across the poster. I must have wasted several hours on it before giving up- I am not nearly experienced enough to illustrate anything remotely detailed in Illustrator, let alone as detailed as my normal work. My only regret was the fine text. I underestimated the effort, detail and importance in creating those chunks of credits, as well as how far it would go in establishing a sense of authenticity. I'm also still struggling with using the texture/clipping tools. I want to create better custom textures and clip them successfully.


Thankfully that can be easily rectified in my free time since it's just text. And that's about it- still a long way to go, but I think I've improved by leaps and bounds already. While no fan of it, I feel more comfortable with using Illustrator- I just need to leave myself a little more time spread out to work on it.

process photos:






Soooo I thought that I would hate illustrator so much that it would probably make me cry, but I haven't shed any tears yet and that's pretty great.
Mostly for this illustration, I did a lot of layers... like... A LOT.
The background was probably the most difficult part because I was dealing with texture and that process is difficult for me. I found some cloud images off of the internet (www.freeimages.com), changed it into a bitmap on photoshop, then imported it into illustrator and then played around with using "image trace" and layering different versions on top of each other. The huge amount of colored lines were image-traced and reflected upon each other.
For the big crescent moon shape, I made a whole bunch of transparent, different colored moon-shapes and layered them together. Then, I used pathfinder>divide and it made this weird, explosion shape. I took a big version of the original moon shape, and did a clipping mask over it.
For the more graphic shapes like the compact and the crystal rose, I used the pen tool and layered and layered and layered.
I really liked the process and yes, it was difficult because this required a lot of patience, but I think the most difficult part was figuring out the text. I'm not sure if it works completely.
also, I listened to this while making it!

For my project I did a poster for the 1978 Superman movie starring Christopher Reeve. For the project I used primarily the pencil tool and the blob brush tool. The stars were created by making patterns of dots with the blob brush tool and then using the copying function using the option button. During the creation of my type, I took a screenshot of the original and kept it next to my art board so I could quickly retype the content, a capability that I'd never really had in Photoshop.

progress shot 2

Suspiria Poster

I decided to make a poster for Suspiria, which is an Italian horror film that is known for it's intense lighting techniques and color palette, so I tried to make color a big part of my poster. I used the pen tool, and the pencil tool for most of the basic shapes. I also used the swirl tool for the background and layered them. I used some paper textures, some ink wash textures, and some concrete texture to mirror the building.

Leon The professional

I decided to do a poster for one of my favorite movies, Leon The Professional. I used the shape tool a lot and the pen tool. I kept it pretty minimalistic, I think anything too complex wouldn't be true to the movie.

Labyrinth

For my movie poster I decided to go with the 1986 cult classic Labyrinth. I was originally going to draw out the two main characters in Illustrator based on my sketches of them, but that proved to be way more difficult than I expected. So then I decided to switch it up with a much more minimal looking design. I started out with the text, then added a gradient to the background using some of the sky colors seen in the film. I played around with different textures for the background, but ultimately ended up going back to the first one I tried. I used the ellipse and pen tool to create the labyrinth, then used the pathfinder to cut out pieces the ellipses, which I had quite a bit of trouble with. The only other thing the originally poster had on it was the Tristar logo, so I went online, found a picture of it and took it into Photoshop. There I got rid of the background and changed the color of it, then saved it as a .png to put into my poster.

I decided to recreate a movie poster for Spirited Away. Unfortunately there are a lot of minimalistic renditions of the poster already, so I decided to work with some uncommon imagery since most of the poster depicted characters instead of symbols. From left to right, the symbols are: gold, Zeniba's shikigami, and the gift from the River Spirit. I used both the pen tool and the blob tool, and also warping effects and selections tools to manipulate the shapes. I used a clipping mask for the shikigami and for the background, and looking at it again I think it would also ground the smaller symbols if I added some subtle textures to them too. For those two, I cut out a piece of a pattern I made for the texture project. I had some trouble finding a slug that was high enough quality to stick on the poster and aligning the text, but I've been looking at it for so long it doesn't jump out immediately to me. I may make a few minor changes later!

300 Movie Poster

Forms simplified from the original sketch.

Started with a dark background and scrapped it in favor of a lighter one.
2 different textures for the shields and capes.

Since we only had a week to complete a full-sized movie poster, I had to sit myself down and decide how to manage my time before starting. At first it was a challenge for me, simplifying my shapes while attempting to retain dynamism in the figures. The use of simple shapes allowed me to get away with utilizing shape tools wherever they fit—along with the blob brush(which I had a ton of fun using, and messing around with both that and the eraser tool made me wish I knew how to use them properly beforehand) and limited use of the pen tool, I messed with the ellipse, rectangle, and star tools. No heavy experimenting with textures this time around, but those splatter textures sure came in handy.

KILL BILL VOL.1

I made two different ones because I like the one with an all yellow field but I think the figure in the second one is more clear as to what is going on. I also didn't really do any sketches for this, I was looking at concept art for kill bill movies and I also skimmed through and rewatched all the important scenes and I didn't see a lot of art for this particular scene. I'm guessing it's because it is the end of the movie and it gives too much away for someone who hasn't seen it before, but the idea just sort of came to me and i thought it was funny so naturally I could not turn it down. To create these posters I used the pen tool and the blob brush a lot. I didn't really run into any problems when making it besides trying to get the line work on the figure in the white to look clear enough as a figure seen from far away for the poster.

Pet Sematary poster Anne Lehman

This isn't my finished piece because I still need to add textures and whatnot. I used the blob tool, the eraser tool, the knife tool, line trace, the text tool, and the width tool most of the time. I still have some things with color to work out, like what the cat should look like and whatnot. All though I used a pretty simple design I'm still facing a ton of challenges with this project.

The Lost Room - Movie Poster

 

For this, I started off with a sketch in Photoshop and roughly made a faux low-poly triangle/polygon mesh using the brush tool. From there, I imported the picture into Illustrator and used the pen tool to create a whole bunch of no-fill-solid-outline triangles that matched my mesh. After that, I copied the final mesh and then took the original, removed the outlines, and then eyedropper tool'd the polygons for the correct color fill. For the background, I made a rough blob with the pencil tool then copied that before applying a 3D wireframe outline to it. The white door was made with the rectangle tool and the perspective selection tool. The last step was some minor color correction in Photoshop. 

Charlie Chaplin - Movie Poster

I started from a drawing that I made. Then I used brush for making the outline of the face, I had a lot of problems in trying to make the illustrator drawing look like the original drawing. Then I had some trasparency and a small paper texture and the text.

My Neighbor Totoro!

For the movie poster I decided to re-create, I chose Hayao Miyazaki's My Neighbor Totoro. I started out using the pen tool to create Totoro's body and face. I used the direct selection tool as best as I could to adjust Totoro's body proportions so that he was able to resemble the original. After that I created circles using the shape tool, but I wanted a more soft, lumpy circles so I used the pucker tool to create small little lumps around my circles. After I was happy with the shape I created, i used the clipping mask tool to create textures on all my little circles and threw them into the background. To finish it off I grabbed a papery texture and played around with the blending options eventually choosing the multiply option giving the poster a old papery feel.