Poster

 

The process behind this poster:

    In all honesty, this poster has gone through about thirteen metamorphoses. My initial impression after creating my Calligraphy poster is that I wanted to connect the two assignments with the theme of guilt. But nonetheless, starting out with this assignment I had an influx of ideas come to my head about what I possibly wanted to create around the theme.

 
    From a young age I loved horror, still now I love horror. One of my favorite small horror stories was from a YouTube channel named HiImMaryMary, where a woman is stuck in a house with creatures that come out in the night. Each creature is theorized to be a part of her own mental illnesses, such being her anxiety, self-loathing, depression, and guilt.

    I have always been oddly obsessed with how the creator displayed guilt. A black shadowy figure stalked her and never truly got close to her until this scene where she was overwhelmed by the demon-like figure. With this inspiration, I was able to sketch my first draft on loose-leaf paper of what I ultimately wanted to do. 

    With this drawing, I wanted to emphasize four things:

1. A woman figure in the image

2. Lighting that revealed a creepy facial feature

3. Smoke being incorporated with text inside of it

4. A cigarette or old-fashioned light source

Out of frame, there is a quote under the box saying "Address your past, or guilt will stare back at you", which eventually transitioned to "Address the guilt or it will stare back at you".

    I went through Photoshop and tried to play around with the image I had in my mind, but I soon realized I was dealing with way too many elements for the time frame I had so I decided to settle for a less complex idea and focused on only the face and cigarette portion. It was in this development stage that I thought that eyes would be more menacing than a smile and ultimately be just easier for me to create.

    I used inspiration from an anime I loved named "Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood" where eyes and smiles in the darkness were a key part of the creepiness of the story. I ultimately used cat eyes as a reference on Google instead of the very slim eyes seen in the show. 

    I ultimately landed on the pop-art style of the poster when I randomized a tetradic color wheel and received very neutral, 50's-60's era colors. I ultimately think this was a great choice because the pop-art style of the poster allowed the eerie creepiness I was looking for to seep through the poster, it also allowed me to add more detail without necessarily changing the shade of any of the colors to maintain the 5 color ratio that was desired. 

    All of this project was created in Illustrator, but to add the light effect I was looking for I headed to my familiar application, Photoshop, and used a soft black brush tool to create a vignette around the image to try to create a spotlight on the focus of the image while keeping the eyes just out of sight. 

    I honestly loved creating this poster and I embraced a lot of my creative self due to getting a major hand on Illustrator and incorporating my background in Photoshop. I can't wait for what I can create next and I hope you enjoyed it!