exurban

I’ve really been inspired by James White‘s do cool stuff and put it out their approach; a thing I feel like I’ve ignored for too long in my career. I have also been inspired by two designers doing great series work; Simony Birky-Hartmann and PJ Tierney.

Wanting a cool project that I could use to work in on drawing and software skills, but would be a lot of fun to do, I decided to combine two of my favorite things; Modernist design (specifically Erik Nitsche’s work for General Dynamics) and Iron Man. You could even argue that Iron Man is a Modernist superhero, although I’m going to do that here.

This ended up being relatively simple but there were a few wrinkles.

I started out doing thumbnail sketches for overall layouts.

Eventually going with this basic concept:

I say basic, because when working on personal projects, I tend not to take my own art direction that rigidly. A lot of what I end up doing ends up falling into the ‘learning/happy accident’ category. My goal here is to create a design that is evocative of a style. If it succeeds then it’s not personally important to me that I have done things like change the character’s pose as I’m working.

The next step was building Iron Man himself. I did a more refined rough that would give me positioning:

In creating artwork like this, I still prefer to rough things out by hand, scan them and then trace and do refined drawing in Illustrator. I ended up changing the pose because I couldn’t nail the arm up one in the thumbnail.

I am a big fan of online tips and tutorials. Drawing this figure I decided to shade him with a technique I read about. You simply create a shape with a gradient, apply a Grain effect and set the transparency to Multiply. I thought this would be really effective for getting the look I wanted and I was right, but it did get me into serious trouble.

One of the things that has struck me as funny about the progression of Adobe Creative Suite is the ‘feature creep’ between programs. You can do raster effects in Illustrator and make vectors in Photoshop now, which is still strange to me. I actually ended up building the whole of the poster in Illustrator. I have a bias toward it as my preferred working environment. What happened is I created a file that was too complex to edit and ultimately, even open once closed. It seems to me that Illustrator is generating the grain effect in real time, which just ended up killing my computer when it tried to reopen the file. The moral, never send Illustrator to Photoshop’s job.

Click through this one to see full size detail.

Really I think the piece ended up better for it, I made a few other moves in PSD that I couldn’t have made in Illustrator and it really brought the whole thing together.

And thanks to Matt Hine for the Goode Projection world map, couldn’t find one on any stock site.

Iron Man © Marvel Comics

- Jayson

I wanted to weigh in on this a little, because this is turning into a thing and I feel like I can actually contribute to the conversation.

James White created his Help Japan poster early after the tragedy following the earthquake; others have followed suit or in the process of doing so now. Almost immediately, there has been a backlash to their efforts, with the criticism stemming from the idea that this profiting from a tragedy, self aggrandizing or from My Brain is Made of Things Made of Gold:

My disaster preparedness kit includes a Swiss grid, some woodblock printing filters, and enough drugs to make me think that doing a minimalist-movie-poster-style poster is going to help out.

Disasters aren’t like causes, causes win supporters through many means: design is one of them. Disasters destroy lives and either you can donate and you have, you can and won’t, or can’t and won’t. No poster, no matter how beautiful, is gonna change that.

And honestly, I don’t care about tribute posters or anything where all proceeds go to the victims…you hang up a disaster design poster on your wall and all I see is a dickbag diploma.

Now I’ve never met James White in person, but I’ve read his blog posts, participated in his Signalnoise broadcasts and followed him on Twitter long enough to feel like I can say the guy is an ok guy. This is what I have to say on the issue:

One of my best friends regularly travels to Japan on business. He was in the Tokyo area when the quake hit. He didn’t experience anything more than inconvenience, which as he said shows you how good the Japanese disaster preparedness is. He was able to leave. A day after the quake he made his way to the airport and fly back to the USA. He was relieved to be away but he told me he felt some kind of survivors guilt. To paraphrase, he said the he really felt that he should be doing something, but there wasn’t anything to do. Still the idea that when confronted with a huge tragedy he should be helping his fellow human beings was a very real and present thing. I told him that not being a search and rescue professional or Tony Stark, there wasn’t anything he could do on the scene and it was ok to leave. In lieu of direct action all he can do is donate to the relief effort. That’s all most of us can do.

I don’t look at the folks that designed relief effort graphics as people who thought ‘I’ll save Japan with graphic design!’ I look at them as people who felt that call to help their fellow human being and thought they could use their skills to magnify their efforts. I know that there are folks that will want to profit from this disaster, there always are. All I’ve seen from the design community is a legitimate desire to help.

Synosia5, originally uploaded by jayson.shenk.

Latest entry for the Signalnoise retro poster contest.

The project begins with the client sending me a cut and paste sketch of what he wants. This is very typical for the way I have worked my whole career, for the most part it is helping people realize their visual ideas.

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