As a little addition to link my full size posters with the vinyl toys I decided to make postcards of the full posters but also with photos of the vinyl toys and the type from the posters. I included the name of the character & the name of the actor that played them & once they're printed they will all be signed & for EMP purposes the cards showing the figures will be numbered as a sort of authentication certificate system. And since it's nearly show time I though it would be good to have some other bits to hand out so I've gone for some prints of my favourite old pieces as well.
In the final crit for this project, year and indeed the entire of my BA degree course the only thing suggested as a change was to make the backing of the Trollhunter poster black in order to keep it consistent with the BTILC poster. I wasn't sure but after using a black backing for the STF poster as well I thought it would be good to have them all on black. I'd tried this before & didn't like it because it added itself to the border and looked like it was cutting into the image heavily, so I switched the border to white - problem solved.
After hours of fiddling about with different coloured backgrounds, tag-lines, different coloured type, fonts, styles, slanting the type, throwing on textures and taking them off again I decided - no, I'm just going to leave it simple. So I did and I think it works well. I already talked about the illustration in an earlier post so I'll skip that. In terms of the text I wanted to keep it similar to the official typeface and Franchise is the closest I could find, it's very similar. It's all in lower case but looks like uppers. I also wanted to keep the yellow of the Trollhunter title as I think that is something that is really memorable from the original artwork. I found that having the whole title in plain yellow left it a little lost in the imagery, I tried it with a black stroke but that didn't help much so I reversed the two, black with a yellow stroke seems to work well. It doesn't get lost because of the boldness of the black but keeps the yellow that I wanted. I carried this across to the information section at the bottom to bring a little consistency and add more yellow. If you compare the layout of this type with that of my BTILC poster you'll notice that they are pretty much the same. This is to keep the series bound as a set.
Overall I'm happy with the outcome of this piece, I think that it displays the mood of the film but in my own illustrative fashion and compliments the original artwork well.
This took about 4/5 days to draw and 2 solid days on Photoshop to paint.
I went with Photoshop instead of illustrator, and a more stylised illustration because I'm trying to work with different styles/techniques across the range of posters to demonstrate my various abilities. Outline first, scan, select range, drop the backing out & then paint underneath the outline. Start with a base colour, usually a mid, then go a shade darker, then again & continue to build them up until you get the desired tones in the right areas. Throw in some extra colours, drop some opacities to get the tones/shades coming through. Many brushes.
The inspiration for this piece (aside from the epic scene in Troll Hunter where he battles the Jotnar) was old movie posters for monster movies. Films like King Kong, Godzilla etc, where the monster towers over everything.
It still needs finishing, the inside needs sorting out, going to add some grass flock to the bottom of the slopes & Troll Hunter lettering on the purposefully flat section on the front. Painted in a mid grey - wash in dark grey - add dry brush of light grey - white on the top.
The third film I've chosen to create an illustrated poster/vinyl toy/other stuff combo for is Trollhunter. For those who haven't seen it, it's a Norwegian dark fantasy about a group of student who go to make a documentary about a bear poacher, but instead get tangled up chasing trolls around with the Trollhunter. It is a superb film. Here's a time-lapse of me making the toy.
The character I chose to depict from this film (sticking with the theme of the 'bad guys') was a Jotnar. A troll over 200 feet tall that the group encounter at the end of the movie. I used a 4inch white 'Kracka' DIY vinyl toy as the base & then applied a huge amount of Sculpey to the head to make it look entirely different. I spent a lot more time on this one with the Sculpey than I did on the BTILC toy & it shows. I sculpted the basic shape of the head and then applied extra features such as lips & ears from smaller sections, also applying extra layers to create contours on the cheek areas & forehead. I then used a pencil & a knife to push impressions into the Sculpey as there was a lot of wrinkles to depict.
I baked it, as before (10 minutes, 95degrees C) only this time I used a ceramic tray with a little bit of water in the bottom instead of a metal tray, this stopped the vinyl from melting but meant that the section of Sculpey touching the water didn't cook properly, so I tipped the water out & re-baked it for a couple of minutes to make it totally solid. After it had cooled I went straight in with a base coat of mid-grey. Once that had dried I mixed up a fairly dark, muddy green wash to overlay & get into all the creases of the face. I followed that up with a dark grey wash & once that had dried I added a mix of light grey & white dry brushing to really pick out some highlights on the face. Spray varnish was applied & left a couple of days to dry.
I applied grey paint to a polishing...thing. I don't know what it's called. It's all fluffy & your meant to use it to polish cars with. I also added what can only be described as week-old paint pot water to give it a horrible green/grey/yellowy colour. Waited for that to dry, cut it up & used PVA to apply it to the figure, then I singed it with a lighter to make it matted & add a nice brown colour to some pieces.
