At this years International Make-Up Artist Trade Show (IMATS) in London one of the keynote speakers is make-up effects legend Tom Savini. I was asked to design a poster that would be placed in comic book shops advertising Mr. Savini. Because of the fact this poster would be in comic shops I decided very early on that I didn’t want to go for our usual slick and clean approach with simple gradients and such. Also, Mr. Savini is famous for his gore and monsters and many of the images I was coming across to use were, in my opinion, too disturbing to display publicly. So I decided to have some fun and go with a very retro movie poster look.

My first step in this process was looking at several old movie posters online and seeing what their palettes looked like and how they played with space. I had to move fast on this poster, needed to go out that same day, so I skipped any preliminary sketches and went right into designing the final. I already had a rough image in my mind of what it should look like anyway. I chose the photos I wanted did “cut-outs” in Photoshop. Then I slid them around and played with scale until I found a composition that I liked. Next I blurred and desaturated each image, duplicated each image three to four times and then changed each image to a different color to represent local color, shadow and highlights. Then I hid those color layers with opacity layer masks and using a brush painted in the shadows, highlights, etc.

Once that process was where I wanted it I flattened those layers and ran them through a couple filters to get rid of the photo-real quality. Then using a new brush I painted over every image and blended them to make it look like an actual painting. I used this same process on the Nightbreed character in the bottom right. The background was made with gradients and dry brush scumbling. There were some other layers and techniques that I did but that’s basically my process.

The border, background, yellow bar, white text box, lower right circle and large “Tom Savini” text were then all added in Photoshop. All the other text was done in Adobe InDesign. And like that I have a painterly retro-poster in less than a days work.

I use Google Chrome as my browser. I’ve recently become aware that the pages in the menu bar at the top of my website show up differently in Internet Explorer. They tend to be crammed off to the right hand side of the page where they don’t all show up. I’m not sure why this is just yet but I’m working on the problem. In the meantime, if you are visiting this site using I.E. you can navigate to the other pages by using the  menu in the left hand column. Thank you for your patience.

—Kyle

An opening spread for the Wolfman feature article in Make-Up Artist issue 82.

Look for the ‘Hanger Project’ advertisements I designed inside the December issue of Esquire.

Make-Up Artist magazine just keeps on rolling. Yet another issue is completed and printed. Like most issues there are aspects of it that I really enjoyed and others that I … didn’t. Overall I’m pleased with how this one turned out but I’m really glad it’s over with and finished. By the end of it I just wanted it out the door and I didn’t care if I ever saw it again. Of course, once the actual printed piece is in my hand I’m happy to see the final product.

Here are a couple of my favorite pieces in the issue. First off is this opening spread of the “Child’s Play” article.

My daughters contributed to this spread in MA 81.

Since this was a piece talking about doing make-up on kids I took the rare opportunity to include my own children in the artwork for it. I set up a mini-photos shoot with my two oldest daughters, Tricity and Inara, with my wife doing the very subtle make-up (can’t have them looking garish!). Tricity was supposed to be the cover girl but after having make-up put on and then about to be photographed she inexplicably developed stage fright. She broke down and ran off. I was losing light fast so Inara “volunteered” and so the cute little smiling face you see there is my beautiful 4 year old. I also wanted some hand shots and by this time Tricity had gained her composure and wanted to be involved. So the hand with make-up all over is Tricity’s. Heh, heh, funny stuff.

Next is this opening spread for an article about make-up artist Norma Hill-Patton. She was the Department Head on The Twilight Saga: New Moon. Now I have zero interest in Twilight … but my wife is a huge fan. So because of her I enjoyed doing this article knowing that she would like it. I also liked that we got some exclusive (and big, high-res) photos for this article. It always makes the art more enjoyable to do when working with photos that aren’t the typical studio publicity shots.

Opening spread of the Norma Hill-Patton feature in MA 81.

The photo for this only went about three quarters of the way across the spread. It worked out that the camera was so large in the foreground though ’cause I was able to fade it out to black for title space. The title itself was designed using an actual photo of the moon, publicity poster art, and different layers of text made up of outlines, transparency modes and opacity masks.

I’m also pleased with the article on artist Hung Vanngo titled “Going Places” which you can see at my graphic design link.