UPDATE. I have since revisited this Jesse Custer, Preacher tribute. Below are the revised versions.
Best wishes
Best wishes
...
Damian K. Sheiles
A blog by Damian K Sheiles about what I do and love - art, design, music and other misadventures.
Showing posts with label DC Comics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label DC Comics. Show all posts
Thursday, 29 May 2014
It's the time of the Preacher!
Here's the evolution of another long poster design. This time based on the Garth Ennis & Steve Dillon comic series, Preacher published by DC/Vertigo Comics. I'll keep the text to minimum and simply show roughs to character illustration to finished poster design as a sequence of images below.
Tuesday, 27 May 2014
Pop Culture, Film & Comics Amalgamate! (part 2)
Continuing from my post yesterday I now present the evolution for the Metropolis Pictures presents Superman in the City of Tomorrow poster design.
The iconic design by Schulz-Neudamm for Fritz Lang's film, Metropolis is unforgettable and served as inspiration for many artists and designers. The original design for the Star Wars character C3PO by concept artist Ralph McQuarrie was based on the android 'Maria' from the Fritz Lang film released in 1927. The city design from the film Metroplois is heavily based on Art Deco stylings of the time period and provide the perfect environment for any pulp or science fiction character to exist in.
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| Robot comparison - C3PO's (right) design was influenced by Maria (left from Metropolis |
The similarity to the world of Metropolis as portrayed in the pages of DC Comics Superman was too enticing a proposition and my curiosity to see these two universes cross-over needed to be satiated. I sketched up a handful of poster roughs for 'Metropolis' at the same time I sketched out the '30 Days of the Dark Knight' poster designs.
The images below show the evolution from pencil sketch to inks and finally to digital colour of my Steam Punk 1920's Superman. I experimented with a monochrome version rather than colour but in the end, felt that the colour version (Blue, Red and Gold) contrasted much stronger against the yellow/orange/gold city/star-burst background.
I wanted to create an Android character as well, further tying the Metropolis concept back to the Fritz Lang film. I experimented with a Brainiac design with Machiavellian mustache but decided that a battle damaged and world weary Metallo with exposed Kryponite heart would be the right Superman Villain for this design.
As the colour version of Metallo is primary gold, orange, yellow and burnt red and contrast against the yellow/orange/gold city and background would be poor, I changed the background to black, enhancing the overall design, resulting in the two 'Metropolis' prints complimenting each other in chiaroscuro fashion. Below are the inked and digitally coloured versions of Metallo.
After the completion of a graphite star-burst pattern on textured board and a technically inked city-scape, finished in Photoshop and Illustrator, I was ready to composite the poster using InDesign.
The two poster designs now complete are were completed with the addition of Title text and a custom Art Deco border drawn using Illustrator.
I hope you enjoyed seeing the design process and evolution for these poster designs. Please check back here soon for another look at art and design projects I'm currently working on. You can follow me on Facebook too if that's your thing.
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| Concept Sketching |
I knew that I wanted to design a long vertical poster so that I could feature the main character in the foreground leaving plenty of room for the city in the background and the poster title treatment above. As I wanted to pay tribute to Superman in the environment of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, the first character developed for the poster was Clark Kent's alter ego, Superman. The modern version of Superman would look out of place in this concept and time period so I looked to the Max Fleischer design from the 1940's animated series for character design inspiration. I combined this classic style with a mix of steam punk costume design embellishments to obtain the 'right' look for this amalgam of pop culture icons.
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| Max Fleischer's Superman / Clark Kent |
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| DC Comics Steam Punk Figurines |
I wanted to create an Android character as well, further tying the Metropolis concept back to the Fritz Lang film. I experimented with a Brainiac design with Machiavellian mustache but decided that a battle damaged and world weary Metallo with exposed Kryponite heart would be the right Superman Villain for this design.
As the colour version of Metallo is primary gold, orange, yellow and burnt red and contrast against the yellow/orange/gold city and background would be poor, I changed the background to black, enhancing the overall design, resulting in the two 'Metropolis' prints complimenting each other in chiaroscuro fashion. Below are the inked and digitally coloured versions of Metallo.
After the completion of a graphite star-burst pattern on textured board and a technically inked city-scape, finished in Photoshop and Illustrator, I was ready to composite the poster using InDesign.
The two poster designs now complete are were completed with the addition of Title text and a custom Art Deco border drawn using Illustrator.
Metropolis Pictures presents Superman in the City of Tomorrow
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| Superman in the City of Tomorrow |
Metropolis Pictures presents Superman in the Menace of Metallo
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| Superman in the Menace of Metallo |
I hope you enjoyed seeing the design process and evolution for these poster designs. Please check back here soon for another look at art and design projects I'm currently working on. You can follow me on Facebook too if that's your thing.
Best wishes
...
Damian K. Sheiles
Sunday, 25 May 2014
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.
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.
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.
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| Final Poster Design A |
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| Final Poster Design B |
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| The Peak Hong Kong photo by Melinda Kinnane - edit DKS |
Best wishes
...
Damian K. Sheiles
Monday, 10 March 2014
Wednesday, 5 March 2014
Lady Tron wants to fight you on the Grid!
I simply love the design of Tron. It's such a fun environment to work in so it was with much relish and enthusiasm that I created the following piece of art: Ladytron - Bring on the Disk Wars!
For those that don't know, Ladytron is a comic character created by comics mage, Alan Moore along with artists extraordinaire Travis Charest in the pages of Wildstorm's Wildcats comic book series. Ladytron is an angst driven, anarchic, narcissistic cyborg with a criminal past and a perfect candidate to fight it out on the grid. For the purpose of this amalgam piece of art, I wanted to play up the Tron aspect of the character's name so I developed a little logo for Lady TRON.
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| Lady TRON logo |
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| Revision 4 sketch |
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| Version 4 colour |
These were integrated with the original black and white line art and then coloured and added to the work-in-progress figure. This saved me having to go back to the drawing board and re-doing the figure from scratch, saving me a ton of time. This is where computers come in real handy.
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| Final art for Lady Tron character |
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| Derezzed Games Program - taken out by Lady Tron. |
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| Background image sans characters |
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| Final composite artwork. Lady Tron Disk Wars |
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| Alternate version |
...
Damian K. Sheiles
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