The Night Porter: out of the safety zone
by Martin
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.
Amazing work, i love the color and custom type.
Could you show your process for coloring? I learned a lot from your spiderman inks, didn’t even know illustrator could use tablet pressure. The coloring is a complete mystery to me.
Thanks Jeremy – I’ll try to show some of a coloring process in a future post. I’m always fiddling with that, I don’t have a really standard procedure…
I really love your art! Its awesome stuff.
How do you make the custom patterns? Are you making them in illustrator or photoshop?
The patterns are made of triangles drawn in Illustrator – I just colored them to form a pattern and then duplicated them around to fit the canvas. That was easier for me than looking into illy’s automatic pattern tools. Also, having those triangles “loose” allowed me to do the custom typeface by painting some of them white, and also something else…
The pattern is made of four different colors, and by merging each color group in a single object I could apply a different gradient to each one.
This works very well… really in-keeping with the movie.
Thanks – If you feel it represents the film, then what I set out to do is accomplished.
Out of pure curiosity, what do you use to draw your masterpieces? Illustrator only or is there something else?
It’s just seems almost impossible for me to imagine that it all vector graphics :)
Absolutely stunning :O
You’re the master!!!
@Sasha, that’s because it’s not vector graphics! I use Photoshop most of the time, unless the project needs to be in vector form — such as a billboard that will be printed in an extremely large size with good resolution, for instance. Those are very specific cases.
Although some people take the time to do very detailed color work in Adobe Illustrator, I don’t think I could ever get the same coloring result as I can in Photoshop.