Work is underway on creating collateral for IMATS Los Angeles. There are several things in the pipeline right now but one of the items that I just finished and is all ready printed is this poster advertising the L.A. show.

Putting this image together included masking the girl, the bird guy and the building  from their original backgrounds, creating multiple layers of texture and then placing text and logos.

Masking the girl was most time consuming because I had to go in and paint around each of the ornate beaded strands hanging from her hair piece. I also did several color adjustments, some minor shadow work, removed piercings and acne, enhanced her eyes, etc. (Nothing is real. If you see a magazine cover of some beautiful woman with perfect skin, don’t believe it. Someone like myself has worked it over digitally. Think of it as art and not a representative image.) The bird man has a very rough mask since I just have him fading out at the edges. I then altered the transparency of the layer to enhance blending and to knock him back further. Same with the image of the Pasadena Convention Center.

The textures were built in many different layers including gradients, half-tone dot patterns, lightly airbrushed masks and bright hot spots of color. By doing them on different layers I am able to shift them around and alter their transparency and blending properties independently until I achieve the composition I want. The overall composition is very close to what I had in my head at the outset. But the details with in the composition get arranged and rearranged until I achieve the right balance.

Even though the text doesn’t go on until later it is a constant factor in how I am designing the piece from the very beginning. If it wasn’t I would end up with an unbalanced piece and/or not enough space for all the information I’ve been tasked with communicating. I design the text the same way I do the image, using a hierarchy of what I want the viewer to see first, second, third and so on. Once I’ve determined what order I want information processed I then use size, color and placement to make it happen.

You can learn more about IMATS LA here.