Poster Development #6 (Final Poster)

All of my poster development over the past few blogs has led up to my final design.

I experimented with digital manipulation in an earlier blog, and I liked some of the outcomes.
I thought I would use digital manipulation to my advantage, in order to enhance my illustration.

By tweaking the colour level of the magenta, black, and the yellow, I was able to make a stunning design, that is very eye-catching, bright, and works well with the album.

The poster is based on a few tracks from the album, notably 'Hounds of Love', and Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God).

I really love my use of digitally manipulated colour here, as I feel like the yellow and red tones give off the impression of danger, and this helps to back up the theme of paranoia, and struggle in the design.
The paranoia and struggle themes are taken from numerous songs, but most notably 'Hounds of love', and ]Running Up That Hill'.
From what I gathered from the song 'Running Up That Hill', Kate is talking about running up the hill, if she only could, as it it is a reference to overcoming life's problems.

In the music video, (which suggests themes of an abusive relationship due to the male dancer shadowing her, and not allowing her to break free), it shows Kate as she struggles to escape, and later on in the video, whilst trying to pass through a corridor, hoards of people hinder her progress.

The poster is trying to convey the struggle of overcoming life's problems, which is what I gathered from the song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp43OdtAAkM < video reference at this link.

I created this bold colour style by using my previous experimentation in digital manipulation, which inspired me to try to enhance the illustration using photoshop settings.

I created this style in a step by step process, which I will go over below.

After scanning my base illustration into Adobe Photoshop, I increased it in size to fit the criteria of A2.
The paper dimensions for A2 are 420mm x 594mm, and this can be set in photoshop by either creating a new document, and typing in the dimensions, or editing the canvas size after creation.
For my poster, I chose to select the size at the time I created the document.

After flattening the image layers, I went into the image 'curve' settings, and with my format channel being CYMK, I was able to tweak all four types of colour.

Here you can see me tweaking the CYMK settings, and manipulating the level of yellow tones.
By doing this, I was able to change the colour tone of the image.

I changed the colour of the background to black, and then I noticed that the white clouds just didn't seem to work with the other colours.
I thought about using red, as it would go with the yellow more, and also red is a colour that is often associated with love.
Since the poster is promoting 'Hounds of love', I thought this would work well with the poster nicely.

Straightening out the bases of the clouds using tools.




Thinking about suitable typography, I selected a font style that seemed to resemble the font found on the original 'Hounds of Love' album cover.
I loved the style of the text, so I wanted to find as close a match as possible.

The font style found on the original 'Hounds of Love' album.

After placing the text, I thought that it appeared too large compared to the design, as I wanted the poster to be very illustration oriented.
I corrected this by reducing the size of the text, and moving it to an area where it wouldn't be very intrusive to the design.
My final A2 poster with the tweaked text size, can be found below.

Also, part of the criteria of the brief states that there must be a 400x400 pixel version of the poster, submitted digitally.





Thomas.