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.)

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

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.

It Came From The Lake, originally uploaded by jayson.shenk. ]]> http://blog.exurban.net/2010/11/18/it-came-from-the-lake/feed/ 0 http://blog.exurban.net/2010/10/29/synosia5/ http://blog.exurban.net/2010/10/29/synosia5/#comments Fri, 29 Oct 2010 18:29:52 +0000 Jayson http://blog.exurban.net/2010/10/29/synosia5/

Synosia5, originally uploaded by jayson.shenk.

Latest entry for the Signalnoise retro poster contest.

The cut and paste lays out in detail what the client wants. There isn’t any conceptual input required on my part, just technical skill in realizing the artwork’s creation. Still there is a lot of room for me to develop the particulars and apply creativity by my design and illustration choices.

Most people aren’t aware that there is not a font for everything, because there are so many fonts. After a brief period of searching for “Jesus and Mary Chain font” and related queries, I realize I will have to draw the type portion myself, creating it by approximating the probably hand lettered art on the Psycho Candy album cover.

The apple is drawn, with early ideas for colorways.

This is an example of how to add creative input despite extensive direction. I decided to go ahead and add the reflections to the candy covering. The clients initial specified colorways are tried and found to be lacking (looks like dirty motor oil, doesn’t it?).

More colorways are tried, the top one is what is ultimately chosen.

Type is made to fit in the apple.

A fit exactly like the clients cut and paste is attempted, resulting in the lower graphic. A bump is added to the lettering.

In the interval, the client sent an email requesting roses be added to the design. The client also sent a photo of more hand-lettered script type for a font specification. A suitable free font is chosen after pricing commercial options. The roses I have drawn for use in previous artwork and are recycled here for consistency.

The original banner layout is found lacking in my eyes, alternate banners are drawn. The type on the first variant is judged to be too difficult to comprehend and the bottom is the submitted ‘final draft.’

The client sends a revised cut and paste. The stem was omitted the entire time because candy apples to not retain their stems.

I am informed that the artwork is to be outputted as a woven label (there was never any initial information on the output format, I had assumed silkscreen based on previous work for the same client) and the curved stem will be problematic. The stem is straightened. While atypical for most designers, I have minimal, if any, interaction with any of the various vendors who produce products for the client. Despite this, the results are almost always good in the end.

The final design. The client approves this and it is made available to vendors.