Mini workshops - The Museum of Spectres and Spooks

Here is my finished ghost poster design, pretty happy with it overall and I feel good about my first proper hand rendered type of this module. I have taken inspiration from Aaron Blecha and came up with a style that works for me, one that I am confident in using. If I was to be really picky I would move the word 'THE' up a little to the right to centre it but I don't think it hinders the composition at all.

If you look through my sketch folder you can see that I made a spider diagram depicting where I wanted to go with this workshop, this one is the one that I am most excited about and because of such I had quite a lot of ideas.

One of the first things I wanted to do was create a flyer for the museum. The image above shows the development from ink to digital colouring, I wasn't a big fan of the image in the middle so I played around with just having a glowing face in the middle of the flyer. That idea was a lot better but I still felt like it could evolve some more, it could be better.

Above is my revisited and enhanced flyer, it looks much better now after I decided that the whole canvas would act as my slimy ghost. I threw my design onto some tee shirt templates also, the blue was just to experiment but the green one is pretty cool. I liked using a few black lines to add in details, the artwork and style has evolved since the first poster design and I like where it's going.

The tickets above were the first thing I made after the poster, the little green ghost in the bottom right hand side of the poster was my favorite so I wanted to incorporate him as part of the ticket. I think i prefer the bottom version as it seems to glow more and the square texture in the background makes it look more plush and ready for print. I designed it so that the purple line would be perforated so that the owner can keep the ghost as a memento, I also left out some of the details because I wanted to include a flyer with every ticket. This was a smart move as I didn't want to have too much type on my image and now it balances out nicely. Obviously for an adult ticket i'd just switch out the part that says 'CHILD' and i'd also just bump the price up.

I have also made a welcome sign to direct the people who come to the museum. This one has a mixture of full line work and pure colour inking, thought I would combine two of my styles and blend them into one, I think it works well.

After playing around with my design I actually decided that the black background is better and it makes everything a lot easier to understand. I'd like a green text though maybe to match the green glow around the hand.

I think I have narrowed it down to two designs. I think I like the one on the left more, simple and too the point. The other one has a more ghostly look but it seems a little harsh on the eyes. Might just want to brighten up the green text a hint more to get that glowing ooze effect,

Right I have revisited this ten thousand times and now I feel like it should be either of the above two. Just not sure about keeping the hand green as I worked hard to get a nice skin colour on the original image. I shall try the image with just the text being green and then i'd like to move on.

This is it, I think this is what I wanted from the beginning but I took the long way around to get here. Nice and simple, green text, enhanced the colour with a neon green layer mask and now I am happy with it. Time to move on and extend this workshop even further.

Mini workshops - The Museum of Spectres and Spooks - figuring things out

When this workshop started we were given a specific Pinterest board to look at, we then had to choose three images from said board that would help to inspire our image. The three images that I chose will be in another post.

Above is a collection of images that I looked at to get inspired for this workshop although I was already excited because this one really appealed to my interests as an illustrator. I am a huge fan of monsters, aliens and all things gruesome and because of such I wanted to get stuck into this workshop before we had even been fully briefed!

As per usual I looked into cartoon ghosts, some of which were from some of my favorite childhood cartoons such as Scooby Doo and Spongebob Squarepants. I've always been a big fan of cartoon monsters as they never really seem to scare me and their exaggerated features just make for great characters. Things that are green and glow in the dark also just appealed to me both when I was a child and now, I do enjoy a good glow in the dark sticker.

Moving on I had a look at Aaron Blecha who is an absolute boss!
I found him whilst I was on my Internship at Hallmark and he is just amazing, he has worked with clients such as Disney and Cartoon Network, he has also illustrated kids books and even has his own brand of Cola!

As far as aspects go this is exactly where i'd like to be as an illustrator. His work is vast and stretches all across the board, reaching out to a younger audience whilst still being able to please the masses and gain all types of commissions. His character design is fantastic and everything has this toxic look to it which is pretty awesome. This was sort of what I was hinting on in the above paragraph, grungy and gooey aspects just appeal to the male audience, in a stereotypical way of course. Boys like monsters and farting, it's simple maths!

The museum of spectres and spooks - Making my final design

This poster took me a little while to throw together but I am happy with the overall outcome. 

From top to bottom you can see the basic path that my imagery took and how I built it up over time. This piece is heavily reliant on digital rendering, the original line work was only used as a guide and was not incorporated into the final image. Throughout the process I was thinking about transparency and how each characters value would affect the end product. Just above you can see two finished images, I am not yet sure which one to go with, the one on the left has a creepy feel to it where as the one on the right feels more Halloween influenced. Either way I am happy with the composition and ready to move on. Because each character is fairly polished off I feel like they could easily be applied as singular elements to other objects such as tickets, badges and even tee shirts. 

We got given a Pinterest board to look through and we were to select three that we liked the most, we then had to apply the influence to our artwork whilst still keeping it our own work. The first image above is of 'the Creature From The Black Lagoon' and I liked it because of it's angular style and awesome vintage horror font. The colour schemes are quite simple and some of the corners look like there are shaded with a spray paint like texture which is also a similar texture i use to shade my images.  The main influence here is the way the text is placed at an angle and it works well, because of such I have angled some of my text in a similar way. 

The second image was again chosen because of it's vintage look and awesome fonts. My main text was designed to look like some kind of ectoplasmic goo and is similar to the blood text above. I also incorporated some bats into my imagery because they matched the 'spooky' theme but by coincidence they take inspiration from this poster. 

 Finally I chose this poster because of its simple angular character designs, elements such as my skulls, bats and mini ghosts were created with this simple design in mind. Because they are simple they stand out and act as strong communication elements for my image, it is also these elements that allow themselves to get reused on other supporting objects such as badges and tickets. 

When I have chosen which final image I want to use I will upload it but for the moment I'll need to move on and focus on another brief.

More to come soon!