Pop Culture, Film & Comics Amalgamate! (part 1)

Wow - it's been a whole month since my last blog post.

When I started this blog, it was my intention to post once every week or four times a month on average. To make up for my lack of posts recently, I'm going to post an art process blog entry every day of this week.

This year I have been creating more art than I have in the last 12 years combined. I have been reacquainting myself with concept, process, technique and execution. At the forefront of all creativity is inspiration or a passionate curiosity to explore ideas in any medium. Earlier I was working on Batman / Tron hybrid artwork designs which also lead to a Ladytron (Wildcats) piece as well. I like the idea of amalgamating 2 franchises or film concepts with comic universes. The results can at once be rewarding and delightfully obvious.

With the above in mind I now present; 30 Dark Days of the Knight.

I was conceptualising a series of poster designs that fused film poster design with comic franchises. The first idea I had was combining characters from the world of Superman with the poster design of Fritz Lang's 1927 film, Metropolis. I'll post a blog about this work later in the week.

Getting back to 30 Dark Days of the Knight; By studying poster designs for both 30 Days of Night and Batman Begins, I was set to create my amalgam tribute piece.

I had already determined that the size I wanted for these particular poster designs was going to be long portrait style, proportionate to half of an A3 page length-ways so my sketches were produced to scale to ensure the design elements would work together (see sketch below on the left). I wanted the poster title treatment to be very similar to the style on the official poster, but I didn't want it to be exactly the same so I added some variation and also distorted '30' a little more and included some extra 'splatter' here and there.

The Batman head sketch evolved from initial thumbnail sketch (above) to actual size rough which was then refined a few time before it was ready to be inked and digitally coloured. The images below show the character/detail evolution for the vampire inspired Batman character element.

Now that the title and main character had been established, I required some paint splatter marks and a lot of bats. The following images are some of the splatters and the bat colony that were used in the final poster design.

 

With all the art and design elements now ready for layout composition, the poster was completed using InDesign. One of the many benefits of using InDesign as my main tool to composite poster design (rather than Photoshop) is the ease of which colour can be edited/changed as well as being able to work on duplicate versions in tandem in the same document. I also prefer InDesign for ease-of-use text editing to PhotoShop.

Here's the 2 final versions. Design B has a photo of The Peak View at Hong Kong superimposed above the title treatment. The photo was taken whilst travelling in Hong Kong many years ago. I ran it through some filters and colour shift so that it worked within context of the design. I also set the over all colour theme to be blue as opposed to red as this further removed it from being too similar to the official 30 Days of Night poster design. Plus cool blue works so nicely with the theme and provides contrast against the white teeth and flesh of the Vampire Batman characters face.

Final Poster Design A

Final Poster Design B

The Peak Hong Kong photo by Melinda Kinnane - edit DKS

I hoped you enjoyed this look at the evolution of my 30 Dark Days of the Knight poster design and I hope you're back to see the evolution of Metropolis Pictures presents Superman in The City of the City of Tomorrow. You can follow me on Facebook too if that's your thing.

Best wishes

...

Damian K. Sheiles

www.dks.net.au