EverythingYouDoIsABalloon*

The kind folks at Advanced Photoshop have featured some of my work and a short interview in a two-page spread in the “Insight” section of issue 71 of their magazine. Advanced Photoshop is a high-end monthly publication dedicated to Adobe Photoshop professionals, and is distributed worldwide.

Thanks to Adam Smith and everyone at AP!

I always keep some small notepads around to sketch whatever or take some notes. It’s an old custom of mine, and because I always get the cheapest, most generic ones and tear off the cover, they all end up looking exactly the same. I keep a few around the house and carry one with me when I’m outside, or when I’m visiting someplace.

I’ve just grabbed the one on my desk to add a few notes to a sketch I started earlier and noticed the yellowing borders of the pages. I had used this pad over a decade ago on a trip to New York and then lost track of it, and I have no idea how it survived this long on its own or why it decided to become useful again.

This is one of the first pages; it’s a quick sketch of a guy who one afternoon walked into the coffee shop where I used to hang around in the Lower East Side, wearing a leather jacket with black wings taped to its back. He whispered something into a person’s ear, and left.

The note at the bottom reads: “It was fun until he turned around”.

My, how time flies. To think that it’s been a year since I last updated this blog, it brings a tear to my eye… all those moments nearly lost in time, like tears… in rain. But seriously, starting right now I’ll be picking some past projects for a look behind the stage. First on the list: FX’s Archer.

As you may probably know, FX’s animated spy comedy show “Archer” draws on the tradition of suave super spies with cool gadgets —and beautiful women— at hand. That tradition was the main reference for this promotional image, which actually started out as a hard-nosed, out of the ’60s film poster. This first sketch had a more realistic approach to the characters, as a tongue-in-cheek play on the audience’s expectancies for the first season:

Eventually we settled on a style that was less confusing, and more representative of the series’ animation.

The composition is peppered with a lot of inside jokes relevant to the series, and the inevitable clichés. My favorites are the Shockwave Mice and Generic Disposable Thug #1 and 2.

Luckily I still have the temporary files for the image (I save iterations due to the constant fear of losing data over a computer crash), so I can show you how this one came to be from sketch to final. Two words: Mon – tage!

A big FedEx box got here today with the Alamo’s Metropolis posters, and they look absolutely great! These are fairly large posters, measuring 60 centimeters wide and 90 cm. tall (about 24 x 36 inches, around the standard one-sheet movie poster size), and I must say the silkscreened metallic inks look stunning.

I can’t get a proper photograph of the metallic effect with my phone’s camera, but here are some pics (no, I won’t do the fashionable “holding a poster so that you only see my hands” type of thing):

Although I have very few posters (and the fact that they will not be reprinted), I’m considering making some of them available for sale once I find a proper way of packaging them. More news on this soon!

Update: The shipping issue is solved, and I can announce the “shop” as open. Only 7 silver prints and 3 gold prints are available for sale (signed and numbered), and this work will not be reprinted, as originally agreed with The Alamo Drafthouse. If you like, you can contact me at hello@martinansin.com for more info!

Update 2: These prints are now sold out.

This was a lot of fun to do; a pitch for a Wii videogame cover featuring Zorro, devised with the great people at Runstrong. We had some room to define the character and the setting, and in a concept board I proposed we include the classic Disney character as one of the references, and maybe add a bit of Douglas Fairbanks in there as well.

We were happy with an attitude that isn’t the common brooding, dark hero, but the smirking swashbuckler we used to follow when we were kids. We settled on this sketch.

Something I set out to achieve was an outlined look to the main figure, not only to bring it forward but also to refer to a cell-shading effect on the game itself:

And to complete the cover I designed a logotype for the game (with a tentative title).

I hope the result is an exciting cover that speaks of a quality title.

As the movie poster series progressed, I felt the need to push myself out of the boundaries that I had set for myself, not only regarding the composition and rendering I had accomplished, but also in the subject matter I was representing. As the shadow of a “safe zone” seemed to be approaching, it appeared necessary to raise the bar a little, and to give myself a complicated task to resolve, and see what came out of it.

The movie I chose came from browsing my collection of Criterion releases, and picking up a title that out of the box was controversial, unpopular, and quite disturbing. Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter is an operatic drama with exploitative tendencies, and the sadomasochistic, decadent relationship between the main characters was what I set out to represent in this poster.

So, with a difficult exercise ahead, I set out of the comfort zone trying not to fall asleep at the wheel.

Here’s a quick summary of some steps in the process of producing this piece.

After the linework was more or less done, I wanted to integrate the title of the film to the main composition. I made a background pattern starting from a triangular grid, and the title font was derived from that grid.

Once this design was set into the poster, I set out to render the artwork.

Many explorations took place here. Transparencies, hard edges to the highlights and the shadows, and some weird blends between the characters; it all took place without much previous preparation.

After all, I feel the experiment paid off with many new approaches that I’ll explore in the future.

It was a lot of fun doing this poster for The Alamo Drafthouse’s SXSW screening of Fritz Lang’s classic.

It will have a live performance of the original Gottfried Huppertz musical score (which is a very lush and fitting score, although I always found that “La Marseillaise” as an incidental motif can get a bit annoying). I’m sure it will be a great event, and I’m pleased with the resulting poster.

It will be printed as a silk-screened limited edition, in a silver version with metallic inks, and in a gold inks smaller run. I can’t wait to get some copies, so I can take some of those cool looking macro shots at an angle and post some here.

The folks at The Jupiter Drawing Room commissioned me for a large format illustration of your friendly neighborhood, for a billboard application at Musica. As the brief called for a large format and good detail, I decided to go all vector on Spidey. It would be more laborious at times, but the scalability of the format was worth it.

I’d like to show you the process for this piece, as it involved some experimentation that could be interesting.

After we settled on a pose and a preliminary lighting study for the character, I started work on the linework directly in Adobe Illustrator. Working in a vector format was perfectly suited for this specific assignment. Although the Wacom pressure sensitivity and line accuracy in Illustrator isn’t as precise as in Photoshop, you get another level of control over the lines after they’re expanded.

The classical comic book linework works well if the character is to be colored later, but for a black and white illustration, it appears completely empty and flat. In order to apply a detailed shading (such as a typical comic book hatching), there were two choices for me; to draw each hatching line by hand -an admirable endeavor that I initially supported- or to come up with some other process that I could control better towards a finer detail when the billboard was looked at up close.

I recalled the old days when shading was applied from a pre-printed acetate pattern over the inked drawing. Once (a very long time ago) I made and printed out some dot gradient patterns in a rudimentary design application, to apply over a black and white illustration. When I remembered this, a new possibility appeared: how about creating a pattern to apply over the “inks”, but also warping it over the shapes of the body, to give the illusion of depth?

This are the patterns that I created in Illustrator.

The hexagonal pattern would be for the red portion of the costume, as a fabric texture. The “comb” pattern was to be used on the blue sections, and the finer one was detail over the eyes and soles. There is one little caveat though; Illustrator doesn’t have a proper warping filter. It would have to be done in Photoshop, which meant I’d have to raster (or convert the image to pixels), losing the patterns as vectors.

The process proved quite successful; the pattern translated well as a texture that follows the curves of the body. Working in a very high pixel resolution, I could later revectorize the shading without losing the original vector’s quality.

After many adjustments, the shading started to come together. Bumping up the web design over the red portion of the suit helped to keep the shadows from becoming too dark, as also did adding a second light source from behind. I considered the blue portions as made from a darker, more reflective material. The straight hatching accentuated this difference, as well.

In the end, the result of the experiment was an illustration that displayed quite a bit of detail up close, and that was fully rendered as vectors and thus, scalable to any size.

There are times when the creative process comes to a deadlock. The Oblique Strategies is a series of cards initially conceived by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt in 1975 that help attack the problem of a mental block or a creative dilemma in a tangential (and random) way; pick a card, and work from where the text suggests.

There is a certain oracular feel to the deck, but the concept does not impose a “go from point A to point B” for a solution. This set of ideas was modified in different versions, and included some blank cards to be filled as needed.

In Eno’s words, “If you’re in a panic, you tend to take the head-on approach because it seems to be the one that’s going to yield the best results. Of course, that often isn’t the case – it’s just the most obvious and -apparently- reliable method. The function of the Oblique Strategies was, initially, to serve as a series of prompts which said, “Don’t forget that you could adopt *this* attitude,” or “Don’t forget you could adopt *that* attitude.”

Gregory Taylor has a site devoted to the Oblique Strategies, which includes the text for the various versions of the deck.

Update: There is an Oblique Strategies Dashboard Widget and an iPhone app out there, but it’s not as nice as keeping your set of cards in a little box near your desk.
Also, it appears that Brian Eno is now twittering, and most of his updates are Oblique Strategies. (Via the comments at Drawn!)

I’m starting a personal project. I’ll try to pay a little homage to some of my favorite movies by designing and illustrating a poster for it. I decided to start with George Lucas’ 1971 film THX 1138, as I really wanted a sci-fi theme for the first one. I’ll try to show a bit of the process in illustrating this poster.

As much as I like the painting for the film’s new director’s cut, I have a soft spot for the posters around the original release date, with the classic layering of several scenes and characters that was common until the eighties. I find the latter approach much more interesting for movies that have spectacular settings and scenes. After gathering reference for the several situations and characters I wanted to include, I drew some roughs for the composition of the poster, and went straight to the linework.

Every character is a separate drawing, to make the coloring easier and to be able to adjust the line color independently. If you’ve seen the movie, you’ll find that the events are presented almost in order from bottom to top; if you haven’t watched it I don’t want to spoil the movie for you, so I’ll stop the hinting at that.

Light and shadow areas are only outlined, leaving all shadowing and highlights to the coloring. I used slightly different approaches to the coloring of the character’s faces, to place them in the context of both the film and the piece’s composition. For instance, THX is really saturated and bold, in electric hues…

…while the other characters are portrayed in a more natural, conventional fashion.

After the poster was colored, I felt that technology was somewhat missing from the whole picture. I added a screen readout of the android police chasing THX, which was an element that added a lot of suspense during that scene in the movie.

And to complicate things further, I dropped the original all caps title for the film and put in a graphic that works in more that one way for me. If you look hard enough, you may see that it actually says “THX 1138″ in there.

You can see a bigger version of this poster over at my portfolio.

Update: This piece is now available as a high quality print at inPRNT.