10th 24 Hour Movie Marathon

Ant Timpson contacted me back in June to do something for this years marathon and back then we both decided something ‘X’ (10) related would be cool and appropriate for the event.

I threw down some quick roughs back then of an X packed full with characters exploding, leaking and basically just super action packed along with a rough of a X robot shooting it up. These originals are below:

From these roughs we somehow built up the idea of a X (both 10 & X rated) VS G (G/PG rated) robot battle. As the idea evolved more we decided to strengthen the idea more with the battle taking place in downtown Auckland, NZ (city of the event). Along with this an array of X and G rated movie characters taking sides battling it out within the city. Below is a quick rough:

From here I took on the epic task of working out how I’d approach/complete this illustration and make each element feel in its right place. I’ve uploaded some of my quick composition files to run through how I developed the scene.

Here (click to enlarge) shows my basic idea of how I wanted to portray the battle. At this point the main focus was to create the X in a more dominant forward going position and the G backing up under fire. To do this the sizing and positioning of the X is more center/upward versus the G leaning back lower. This is all good, but in a landscape composition it could easily feel too heavy on the X side. To solve this I approached it in a ‘push/pull’ kinda way and used certain elements to balance it out. These elements include the skytower being on the G’s side, a taller building on the G side countered by closer but smaller buildings to the X’s side. Along with these obvious elements, the positioning and size of the smoke/destruction/characters also played a big part in creating the X dominance while maintaining a balanced/equal feeling composition.

Here is rough placement of the characters and type. At this point I thought the type in the forefront on top of a building looking over the scene would be cool and help to create some more depth. I then decided on a Hollywood like sign as you can see below. Also worth noting is the billboards/signs around the place which are for the sponsors of the event/various films at the event.

Here is my near final linework ( below / click to enlarge). You can see more clearly here the ‘push/pull’ approach to the composition.

I created the upper building and the type without thinking much of the lightning of the scene and soon realised it would need to be not too dominating as there was so much going on anyway and the composition could easily become very confusing to the eye. I decided on a dusk lighting of the sun going down between the robots and used the smoke to the sides to frame the battle even more. Along with the smoke, a darker tone or shadow of the type would help to further frame the battle. The only problem with this was that the type may not be easily recognized so I made a shadow, slight outer glow and lighting on the depth of the wooden sign.

Below is my final (click to enlarge) which I’ll then run through the colour/materials used. The size of this is A1 over sized (around 110 cm x 74cm).

To get to this point I made some quick photoshop fills/selections so I could control the colour of the elements and prepared three print outs of the linework for some traditional textures/rendering. The three mediums I used (acrylic, charcoal and water colour) were all seperate and then scanned in and stitched togeather. After scanning them in I found they were a bit too overwhelming with everything else that was going on so I pulled them back a little bit to make the textures more subtle. Alot of the work done by hand and texture can’t be seen on the computer due to the large sizing of the poster.

Colours are pretty straight forward, X = darker/evil, G = more candy/fun. The overall feel of the scene required multiple layers of colour balance and layer effects to arrive at the final.

Overall the preperation/composition work on this job made it alot easier in its final colouring stages and I couldn’t stress enough how important it is to establish a good composition/design before even thinking of how to render it to a final. It’s also worth noting that I was quite rushed at the end and didn’t get to polish it as much as I would have liked to, but its better to have a less polished poster at the event than none at all!

Phew big read, but hopefully useful.