EverythingYouDoIsABalloon*

I’m honored to have been selected to be in the latest volume of Taschen’s Illustration Now!. It’s amazing to be able to find my work among so many great artists, and being part of a Taschen book is a privilege that I certainly never expected.

Illustration Now! Vol. 4 features 150 illustrators from 30 countries, including information about their career paths and lists of selected exhibitions. Also included are two introductory essays by specialists Steven Heller and Bruno Porto on current trends in the field, with a cover featuring the work of Gabriel Moreno. This book is perfect for graphic artists, creative professionals and illustration students, as well as anyone with an appreciation for draftsmanship and visual language. Edited for TASCHEN by Julius Wiedemann.

Today is a huge day for the great folks at Mondo, and all us artists involved in their releases. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which stages the Oscars awards each year, has announced that the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences’ Margaret Herrick Library will archive Mondo’s growing collection of original film posters.

The Mondo posters will be housed in the Herrick Library’s existing collection of more than 38,000 posters, stored in climate-controlled vaults, and scanned into the library’s online catalog. Here’s the full release:

ACADEMY LIBRARY AND ALAMO DRAFTHOUSE
TO ARCHIVE ART MOVIE POSTERS FROM MONDO

Beverly Hills, CA – The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Margaret Herrick Library is partnering with the Austin-based Alamo Drafthouse theater chain to archive the company’s growing collection of original film posters designed by contemporary graphic artists. The first group of the Alamo Drafthouse’s Mondo posters arriving at the Herrick will include the latest print, a poster for the classic horror film “Frankenstein” (1931), created by Drew Struzan.

The Margaret Herrick Library poster collection includes a wide range of works created by noted graphic artists, such as the Stenberg brothers’ constructivist poster for “Man with a Movie Camera” and Wiktor Gorka’s arresting poster for the Polish release of “Cabaret.” The library also holds all of the film posters designed by Saul Bass, including his groundbreaking key art for “The Man with the Golden Arm.”

I’m just floored to know that something I produced will be preserved for future generations in the Herrick Library, in the company of so many great works. This is a great honor and a huge gift that really validates the screenprinted film poster movement.

Mike from Under The Floorboards got hold of William Shatner at the London Film and Comic Con, and asked him to sign my Space Seed poster. Apparently he liked it a lot. That is very kind of you, Captain!

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!

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.

Check out the finished piece in a larger size over here.