Poster Progression

After establishing what flatplan my audience wanted for my magazine advertisement, I began work on it in the program Paint tool Sai.

The first thing I did whilst using this program was to set the size of the canvas. I used 2480 x 3508 pixels, the size of international A4 paper and the size of most magazine pages.

I began my poster by creating a new layer, onto this, I sketched out the basic design for my poster, as seen on my flat plan, I used the pencil tool for this as it allowed rough and thin lines, suitable for sketching.

Once I was completely happy with my sketch, I began the outlining progress. For this, I created another layer and used the pen tool. My reasoning behind this choice was that the pen tool is very smooth and allowed me to create slightly thicker, professional looking lines.

I continued working on this layer with the pen tool until the whole of Wren was neatly outlined. I then changed the visibility setting for the sketch of Wren underneath, hiding it so only the pen outline was visible. After doing this, I created another layer for pen tool outlining ZED900 and another one after that for outlining the grass/gear.

I hid the sketch layers for both of these to neaten it up.

After this had been done, I needed a background. This had to be very simple in keeping with the common conventions I had observed with other magazines and in order to not distract from the foreground. I used dark blue for the background as it was simple and worked well with the foreground. For the background I didn't just flood fill the dark blue as I felt it would look too plain, I used a tool named the 'water tool' and coloured the page in with a large sized brush. I did this on a separate layer, blocked in some layers and left some parts of it lighter, so it didn't look to blocked in an plain. 

When colouring on top of this, I used the eraser tool to remove colour in the parts that I was going to be working on top of this, I did this was because the tool I was planning to use for colouring Wren and ZED900 was semi transparent and relied a lot on the backdrop being white.

 

Whilst colouring the characters, I used the 'marker' tool, this allowed me to colour as you would on paper and get a very nice effect to my work. This was rather time consuming, but I am very pleased with the outcome. When setting up Paint tool SAI, I coordinated the program with my tablet pen to make it so the harder I pressed on the pad, the darker the marker went.

Doing this helped me get a lot of detail and shade my work easily, I also feel it gave my advertisement a quirky feel which works well with the indie category of games.

I used the water tool Wren's face as it gave a diffused and simple effect needed for skin rather than the strands needed for the hair.

For ZED900 I continued using the marker but chose a larger brush size so I could still use pen pressure to change the colour but so it didn't look so strandy like I needed with the hair, I used a similar technique for the clothes.

Finally, I coloured in the grass and the gear to complete this image and saved it as a high quality jpeg. I will now need to import it to photoshop to work on adding text and iconography.