Thanks to Adam Smith and everyone at AP!

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”.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!)