EverythingYouDoIsABalloon*

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.