exurban

After finishing the Stark Industries 1963 poster, I decided to take a detour and do one for his long-time antagonist, the Crimson Dynamo. Part of this project is changing styles with every poster and I decided I want to do a Soviet-style propaganda poster.

I was also strongly influenced by the recent purchase of a book of the design work of Abram Games, the British designer and one of my personal design heroes.

Process detailed after the break.

Same was with the Iron Man poster I started out with some layout thumbs to get a general idea of character size, position and design elements.

I also did a sketch on the Mk. I Dynamo suit, based on one of the panels in the character’s debut, to give myself a feel for drawing it.

After finishing this sketch. I realized pretty quickly that the Crimson Dynamo’s original suit is actually world class ugly. I felt like the choice was basically ‘change the suit, pick a different suit, or change the character to the Titanium Man.” However doing some research for reference, I came across the cover to Tales of Suspense # 46.

I am not sure what the deal is with this. The Dynamo was never actually drawn like this in any of his appearances, but the suit as depicted here was really much more what I wanted. It has the appearance of a high tech, armored space suit. Since I was making this a “Soviet” poster, I wanted the character to look heroic. This look says to me “pinnacle of Soviet technology and hopes for a technologically Utopian future.”

At this point, there was the very laborious process of tracing the character in Illustrator and building the shading up. While this project was making its very halting progress, I rediscovered the work of Abram Games, who was one of my very early influences. I decided that I wanted to simplify the character and shade him in a similar manner. The shading effect here is created by using gradients and gradient meshes as transparency masks to black fills. It’s pretty simple, but it’s time consuming. It is not however, as hard on your computer as the Noise filter I used on all of the components of the Iron Man poster, and I was able to complete this project entirely in Illustrator.

One other interesting thing to note. I originally did all my work in the CYMK colorspace. It’s a poster, ultimately the goal is to print it, therefore it’s CYMK. Then I remembered that James White never designs in CYMK, but always in RGB and has his posters printed digitally, which offers a much wider color gamut.

As you can see, the RGB version is much more vibrant. There is also a difference with how it renders the transparency masks, which I think enhances the overall look of the poster significantly. As you can see there were a number of other changes. I redrew the helmet, redrew much of the shading to make the light source more logical and had someone who is fluent in Russian look at the text (I had used Google Translate.)

 

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