Occasionally I get to break away from just graphic design mode and do some illustration work for the magazine. Being the Art Director this is my choice but more often than not it just doesn’t call for it. Make-Up Artist magazine is primarily a trade magazine that exists to show case the art of make-up artists and not my own personal portfolio book. But sometimes, as with the illustration above, there is just no other way to communicate or make interesting the design of the article.

For the “Out of the Kit” column in Issue 84 make-up artist Barry Koper wrote about needing an inexpensive beard form. He decided to use a styro-foam whig head for this purpose. Only one photo was supplied showing the final beard form that he had made and it was rather dark and uninteresting photo. Again, my job is to make the page grab the reader. I took this opportunity to draw Mr. Koper contemplating how to use the whig head he found. In the layout there is a word balloon with a pull quote from the article and though balloons going up the page to the photo of the final beard form. In the end I think it adds a little bit of humor and fun to what would have been an other wise lifeless page.

This is the opening spread for our Summer Movie Preview in Make-Up Artist issue 84. After looking through all the images I had for this piece I saw what the title was and there was no question in my mind that using Scarlett Johansson from Iron Man 2 would be the perfect opening. She exemplified every word in the title. So I did cut-out of her from the background and put my title art together. This is also a perfect example of how my title art drives the design for the rest of the article. I didn’t have a clear idea of how I wanted to layout the photos in this piece until the title art was in place with its overlapping orange boxes. After that the theme seemed obvious.

One of the things I’ve mentioned before on this blog is how I approach all my article designs with the need of “entry points.” These are areas on the page that catch the reader’s eyes and break up the monotony of plain text. It gives the reader different areas of interest to “enter” the article. For the piece the info boxes you see with brackets were not a part of the original written text. I made the decision during production to add these as a way of giving readers quick bites of information before they dove into the rest of the text. These along with sub-headlines and caption boxes give the reader a choice of how much or how little information they want to pursue.

You can see more images from Issue 84 here.

I’ve been so busy lately that my time to update the site with Make-Up Artist issue 83 details has come and gone. However, I wanted to post at least one piece from this issue and talk about it a bit. I chose the below opening spread from a feature about artist Alex Box.

I like the simplicity of this spread. When I first got the photos for the article this image of the girl with a flowing pattern caught my eye immediately. Sometimes when I start work on an article it’s tough to nail down exactly how to open it. But quite often, as with this spread, I see where I want to go right away. I knew that the photo was strong enough to stand on its own so I decided on a very clean design that wouldn’t detract from it but enhance it.

The original title of the piece was “Outside the Box” or something along those lines. For good or bad I tend to go very literal in my title designs. So I immediately began designing the box graphic in Adobe Illustrator. I made a simple square and then used the 3D extrude & rotate tool to made a cube which I rotated around until I had in the position I wanted. Then I expanded the object so I could manipulate each of the cube’s faces. Using the scribble tool I tweaked each side to exactly where I wanted the detail to be. Color scheme for the title was inspired by the quirky acid goth make-up that Ms. Box wore to IMATS London. After completing the initial layout and turning it over to Editorial for proofing the Managing Editor, Heather Wisner, decided she wanted to change the title to “Box Set.” I changed the artwork accordingly.

You can see a few more of my Issue 83 designs here.

I’m really behind on updating the site! Issue 83 of ‘Make-Up Artist’ has been out for at least a month now and I have yet to put anything for it up. I have no excuse. More stuff coming very soon!

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.