So I finally finished this! Well finished in the way that I ever really finish anything. I submitted it to the Rad25.com event poster design contest, so I shouldn’t make any more changes on it.  I’m pretty excited about finishing it, I’ve learned a lot as I went along. I could have avoided a lot of the mistakes that I made in the begining. It may not be the perfect poster for the event… it might not win, but I’m not going to be that disappointed if it doesn’t. I am the guy that made my own hooded sweatshirt in my spare time.

Now on to the next poster… I’m thinking Airborne.

I’m trying really hard to stay motivated on this project. I love the movie, but I’m running low on free time and all the new house stuff is taking up a lot of my time. I’ve pretty much got all the major moments of the film in some degree of completion in the poster. I’m struggling with a few layout issues, it’s harder than I thought to include all the major and some of the minor characters in a poster and still make the image flow and look coherent. I have a lot of respect for all poster artists now. It’s been about 2 months since the last update, so I have a couple more characters than usual, as always these aren’t the final versions. I’m still getting all the skintones and color palate correct. This is clearly going to be the biggest Illustrator project that I’ve ever attempted.

Like always it’s a challenge for me to keep scale in mind when it comes to detail for the project. Example, even if I print this out at 44×61 those two girls are probably going to be about 3 inches tall… they have way too much detail, but I got carried away.

Please forgive the crudity of this model, I didn’t have time to build it to scale.

Read more

This has been an unprecidented level of motivation for this project. It probably comes from knowing that other people are working on a goal of having the 25th aniversary screening of Rad in Cochrane, Canada and that would be the deadline for this project.  Check that out at TheMovieRad.com.

As this project goes along I’m somehow getting better and worse at illustrator at the same time.  When the source image is of low resolution its really important to know where to make the lines in order to convey the shape or shading that you want. But it’s also a lot more work and this is clearly the biggest project in terms of illustrated faces that I’ve taken on.  So I get a little fatigued in certain ones and I think it’s starting to show in the details. After putting a few of them together I realized that it’s really going to be important to stay consistent in style, level of detail, and skin tones. But, really of these four, the only one that I’m not extremely excited about is the Luke and Becky one… mostly just Becky’s neck… she looks like she has some kind of giant worm neck…  So these previews are really going to change in the final, or at least some of them will.

But not Mr. Timmer… that one is awesome.

He may get his own print.

Bart Racing

McDouche

Mr. Timmer

Luke and Becky

In an effort to keep motivated I’ve decided to post regular updates about my projects that are still in progress. I’m going to do this for a whole bunch of projects when I move into the new house, but for now the most ambitious project I have on my plate is the Illustrated poster for the 1986 movie RAD.

I made a huge amount of progress in the last couple weeks. These drawings are all clearly preliminary as I will probably go back into them an add or take away details depending on how big they will be in the final print. I’m trying not to get too excited about it because I have a tendency to lose motivation when I can see the project being complete in my mind. But I have a plan for this one so I’m trying to be more organized. I have full color illustrations complete-ish for 5 characters on the poster.  I’m posting previews of three more of them below.

Sgt. Smith

Bart Taylor

Mrs. Jones

I think I mentioned a WHILE back that I was working on a new poster for the movie Rad.  I was originally planning to do it in more of a line drawing/hand inked style but after a bunch of drawings I realized that I’m just not happy with the way I draw people… yet. But I am happy with my vector drawings of people,  so  recently I’ve gotten a little more excited about it and I’m making some progress on it. Here’s a sneak peak at two drawings that will be featured on the poster.  I’m not finished with them but I think that I’m going in the right direction. I just need to get the layout right and include all the moments that I love from the movie.

So I’ve had this idea for a while…

I threw together this mockup of what it would look like…

I’ve always wanted to do something special with my car, but it has been a pretty new car and looked alright so I didn’t want to do anything that would screw it up. When I started driving to work more and I got a few scratches and dents I thought… maybe now? When I drove through a car wash and it stripped most of the paint off of my front rim, I thought…  maybe now? When we were driving down the highway and a random piece of metal hit the front of it and left a couple of large holes, I thought… Now?  When driving down to Florida over Thanksgiving and a large black piece of plastic under the front of the car came loose and started scraping the ground, I thought… the time is just about right.  But the latest in the evolution of my car from “Respectable Vehicle” to “Semi-Beater” was when I was trying to open the back hatch and the piece that is both trunk hatch button and tail light broke off and is now duct taped back on. So there’s already some tape on there… might as well go for whole show.

So now I’m thinking of making this design with colored electrical tape. I should probable go the extra step and do it in colored vinyl so that it won’t get all gross and sticky in the Summer. But with electrical tape I feel that it would go on quicker and come off easier… if I only leave it for a short amount of time. I’ll probably have to tweak the design a little so that it looks more like rainbow colored blood and maybe have some police tape blocking off the section around the unicorn.  I’m sure I’ll get some weird looks having what is basically a rainbow running down the side of my car… but it might be worth it to achieve SUPER AWESOME STATUS