design on design

Sgt. Slaughter custom cardback

I've been doing a lot of custom cardbacks for toys lately. I fully did the drawings of Sgt. Slaughter in Procreate on an iPad. Once complete, I brought them onto my computer and did the rest of the card layouts to mimic the 1985 and 1986 design esthetics of G.I.Joe cardbacks. The front of the cards were left entirely up to me and the backs were more geared toward what the client wanted, while still keeping with the general look of Joe cards from that era.

NOTE: These are watermarked for the blog only, not for the printed cards.

Photo manipulation

This is the final version.

I was asked to splice these photos together. The photographer missed having them all in one shot together.

RSVP

A simple RSVP, made exactly the way the client requested it. It's not the most exciting thing, but it was interesting to do. I've always loved working with text, so this was a small opportunity to do it. Also, making the lights glow brighter but still look natural, etc.

Podcast covers

Since my last post I have actually become the co-host of the Cinema Villainy podcast. I've been designing a new cover for each episode, even some of the old episodes that I wasn't co-hosting. A lot of time I take a still from the movie and Photoshop it into something different. The following are a few of the ones that I like the most...

I took the image of Ryan Gosling from one of the posters for the movie and over-saturated it with this shade of blue. Then I took a cityscape from from Los Angeles and put it in the background and hit it with pink. The sky was fun to shade like this and then I just added text. It took a few minutes to find the font they used for the movie, but this color scheme seems to be in a lot of the designs for the film.

Leeloo had just been "born" and was on the run at this point. I always loved the framing of this shot. I enhanced the light and dark areas of the drain pipe and made it orange. I took the background behind her and made it a different hue of orange. I brightened Leeloo up and blurred things up a bit. The simple text is similar to that used on the original poster.

To me, this sums up a lot of The Professional. It's Leon hugging Mathilda after he has saved her again. The entire film revolves around Leon basically being a father figure to her so this seemed like the perfect choice. It is a movie about a hitman, however, so the grungy red made sense to me. I used simple text again because it put me in the mindset of a typewritten police report.

Cinema Villainy podcast cover

The guys from Cinema Villainy know how much I love listening to podcasts and how much I love their podcast. They got in touch about having me do their cover image and I was more than happy to do it.