Some time ago, I received a commission to paint a poster to commemorate the Formula One race in Monaco. Only, it's not the Formula One race, but the Formula De race, which is really a board game care race played with dice and markers on a tabletop track. Even so, I wanted to make this poster look really official.
I've mentioned on JSVB before my admiration for master illustrator James Gurney and his instructional books. For this poster, I tried to employ as many of his trick of the trade as I could.
The first step was to create a mock-up model of the scene, which I did by making a photo collage of a Monaco street scene in Photoshop. Some of the buildings you see in the picture line the route of the real race, but most are cut and pasted from other Mediterranean playgrounds of the rich and famous. I used Photoshop's Distort and Perspective edit functions to make the buildings fit into the scene. Then, I figured out the lighting and how the sun would stream down the road. By this time, I had an exciting and dynamic composition laid out.
James Gurney gives very strong lessons on how to create a realistic colour palette and use lighting to make the colours pop. I started out with a reasonable palette, but the shadows were too muted and the bright colours weren't bold enough. So I used Photoshop to advance colour vibrance to its maximum and saved that picture. Then I doubled the vibrance by maxing it out again. The colour set I ended up with is close to what you see in this picture.
I used it to sample the colours I wanted and painted over my photo collage to create this colour test image. I was very happy with how this turned out on the first try. This picture is around the size of a postcard though; the final project was to be poster-sized!
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