DMF Poster Project

When I heard that our latest assignment was going to be the creation of posters, I couldn't have been happier. In my career as a graphic artist, I have been professionally commissioned to create promotional materials for such names as Carol Channing and The Moody Blues. As far as I am concerned, the creation of a poster is one of the most existential forms of expression in the graphic arts medium. People become informed by posters about just about everything from rules to events they want to see.

When choosing a concept, I decided to sidestep the familiar territory of music and go towards concepts that I have worked the least on. The concepts I chose were for a movie and for a fictional event. For my first piece, my movie poster, the timing could not have been better. I had been commissioned by an independent film maker in Racine, Wisconsin to create a promotional poster for his zombie film, "Becoming Undead."

When commissioned to create this piece, I was allowed to view the short film prior to its release. Since the film regarded the macabre subject of becoming a zombie as opposed to an all out assault of the undead (a la Dawn of the Dead), I wanted to capture the nightmarish feeling of the movie in the poster. This came to me in the color red. I employed red shading to screen captures that I had taken from the film itself and edited them accordingly. One of the tools I found most useful in this project was not only colored layers and overlays, but the eraser. In order to get the fine lines and cuts, such as in the figure holding a gun to his head, I had to employ the use of the eraser to allow the figure to blend into the background. Also, the eraser allowed me to have that figure jump off of the apparent canvas and into the lower marquee, drawing attention to the name of the film as well as the director.

Also, as far as the text was concerned, I used the tagline of the film right next to the garish figure at center. Since there was some empty space that would have seemed awkward and attention grabbing if left empty, I decided to place the tagline there in order to even out the piece.

Looking at the gestalt, I see that the motif of the poster will capture the attention of those who are truly horror fans since I emphasized much of the overarching emotion within the poster itself in a macabre fashion.

For my second, more jovial, piece. I decided to create a poster for a fictional event. This event would be an all out Grand Prix style race through the heart of Downtown Ashland! I chose to go with this concept, not only because of the absurdity, but also it allowed me to utilize a photograph of my car in a piece of my artwork!

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I once again employed the eraser (which is a tool I never really used in the past) to cut my car out of a photograph. The eraser came in handy here because simply lassoing it gave it incredibly obvious cutlines. In order to eliminate the "photographic quality" of the car image, I applied blur and filters to it. Since the emphasis of this piece is speed, speed and more speed, I created a duplicate of the "descending cars" and applied a heavy motion blur. Now, at that point the background seemed plain, so I applied an off center gradient stripe to allow the eyes to have a guide to the name of the event at the top. But, a simple color gradient background seemed plain, so I decided to add a picture of a freeway in the background. Thankfully, I was able to find a slow-shutter photo of a freeway that had a right turn in it, and it framed the cars in the foreground perfectly. Now, the name of the event is placed along the lines of the lights to draw the eyes in a full circle around the piece. The usage of these shapes help emphasize the excitement of the event, as well as create a shape framing that creates a circle within the piece without it being an immediate circle.