Man oh man! Week 2 snuck up on me! I have not gotten very far on this at all, but the important part is that I do have progress to show and I’m not skipping days like some people **coughandrewcough**, ahem, excuse me, allergy season.
I started by trying to figure out what the Mexican Sheriff was going to look like…I’m not overly thrilled with any of the drawings I have done (seen below are the laughable “best” two thus far). I need to try and get back into this soon before I fall behind. I should just draw Danny Trejo instead and call it a day :)

Hear Ye, Hear Ye! Let the Medieval cards continue to pour in!

Well February is almost over, and for this glorious month of Groundhogs, Love, Presidential Birthdays,  &  Black History, I decided to honor them all by creating a fictional movie poster that depicts Robin Hood getting ready to confront a Sasquatch!

I hope you enjoy it, and I will see you next week with preliminaries for March, the theme is SOUTH!

Here we are in week 2 already, February is flying by! So this is the week where I piece together all drawings and try and figure out the layout.

I set up this first one and wasn’t really feeling it. Robin Hood seemed really small and unimportant and the whole composition really seemed to be lacking in excitement.
The second one was getting a little better. I brought Robin Hood forward in the scene by making him bigger. I felt that this was making a stronger impact overall but Robin was still fighting for space and attention with the Sasquatch.

In the third one I really started to feel good about the layout. Robin hood was now the center of attention while the Sasquatch become more hidden and further away. I’m sure things will move around again before I am done, but so far this is where I’m at.

Well I made it, one month and one card down!

Here is the fruit of my labors, I give to you FUTURA: The Vixen From Venus!

I also have posted this on my personal blog if you are interested in seeing the piece in its entirety 3ddevine.com.

Something kind of fun that I am also throwing in these posters is hidden elements. I am planning on hiding a diamond in every piece as well as having the number represented somehow. What the hell am I talking about? Well I will just tell you for this first one. The alien has a Diamond on his space suit and the number 2 is represented by the word “Venus” which is the second planet from the sun…dorky and pointless but fun at the same time.

Thanks for looking, I will see you next week/month with the first glance at the 3 of diamonds…with the theme MEDIVAL!

Here we are in week 3 already. I decided that for this week I would discuss my process a little bit, so hear we go!

A: First thing I do when I open up that wonderfully intimidating blank Adobe Illustrator page is make a background color, it helps to set the mood and feel while your working, even if that color changes later it’s a good staring point. I then import my final sketch onto a separate layer and set its blend mode to multiply. By doing this it allows me to begin building my shapes underneath while still being able to see the original drawing.

B: Using the pen tool I begin to block in the main shape for the face and create her space helmet using the ellipse tool.

C: I continue with the pen tool and start to create the important features of the face. In the case of her lips and parts of her eyes I am adding a stroke to the shape as well to help define it.

D: Once all the main parts are there, I make a custom brush to use with my Wacom tablet. The tablet allows me to make strokes that can be thicker or thinner depending on the amount of pressure used, similar to an actual marker. Anyways I use this brush to add minor details, such as wrinkles and creases to help create a less sterile more “natural” look.

E: A pretty big jump from D, but at this point I am pretty much repeating the process until it is DONE….which it is, but you can’t see until next week BWA HA HA HA!

Well here we are in week 2 already. I finished up my drawings and scanned them into the computer.

First thing I had to do was combine my drawings into one image then I started moving things around until I got the layout to be more or less in the right place. I put it into the playing card template to make sure everything would fit in this small format size. The text is just a place holder for now, still not sure what I want it to say exactly.

I threw in the blue to help give me the feel of the overall color. I really want to try and limit my color palette to a maximum of 4 colors in order to really get the feel of a screen printed poster.

The pictures below are just detail shots of the Space Girl and the alien. My next step is to take this into illustrator and start the final render.  See you next week ….or should I say IN THE FUTURE!

So before we started pulling random words and assigning suits and all that razzmatazz, I decided that I was going to theme my suit by making faux vector style posters. Seen in these pictures is the beginning of my “future” themed card for the 2 of diamonds.

In my head I instantly saw a poster for a pulp science fiction style movie. I knew I wanted to have a pin-up space girl and some sort of alien so I messed around with several thumbnails. A & B are a couple of them. C is a slightly more fleshed out thumbnail of A. Here I figured out the general layout and overall feel of the poster.

In the second picture I threw together a few of my initial sketches of the alien, who at one point started to look like a rabbit, not really happy with any of these so far but you got to start somewhere.

The third picture is an early sketch of the Space Girl, who I will probably name Futura (good idea Andrew). Still in the works, we will see where we end up in the weeks to come.