Turn Back Now

So I dared challenge the Minimalist Movie Poster design assignment. Looking retrospectively at other legends such as Jim Groom’s The Birds, Audrey Williams True Grit, or Carlos’s Pyscho. I can’t say my work has been a huge success, but sometimes it’s the journey that matters. So let’s go along and see what happens….

I didn’t have a direction. Initially I was working on a Spirited Away poster, picking away at pixels to depict the bird holding the mouse for two hours. The next morning I scrapped it, and thought more about what I wanted to do. I was drawn to Princess Mononoke and the little ghost spirit.

Here’s where the matter gets sticky. I was building some familiarity with GIMP but, as I was spending the day in Monroe, I was left without anything to work with. Searching through the computer, I found something intriguing. Adobe Illustrator CS5. And so I decided, why not?

If you aren’t familiar with Adobe Illustrator, it does look strikingly similar to GIMP or Photoshop but those are Raster Editors, while Illustrator CS5 is Vector Editor. At its most basic level, vectors deal with points, lines, and polygons (geometry) while Raster deals with continuous cells of data.

While working on this assignment, I didn’t know any of this. I was simply thinking, “What is this thing?”

CS5 Interface

Looking at the interface there are some familar signs.  You have the toolbar on the left with various tools, similar options in the header, and on the right is an advanced layer board where you have great manipulation of colors, brush size, graphic styles, and transparency.  There are some cool features, especially with graphic styles and trasparancey, that I haven’t explored yet.

Image Overlaying the Canvas Interface

So you bring in an image.  Illustrator CS5 works a little differently, however, in that the template is a canvas that you can manipulate and the image is sort of a standalone piece.  I can’t currently edit in to any significant extent, but I could some overlays with it and other images or stuff I draw on the canvas.  To actually edit the image I need vectify the raster by clicking the live trace button in the header.

This Live Trace button is probably the coolest feature I’ve found and something that others can use in Adobe and then export it into GIMP.  Take a look at this tutorial if you want to know more. I’m new to the program and don’t fully comprehend all the possibilites Live Trace does, but it’s relatively easy to use and allows you to actually manipulate the image.

Here’s some examples of some Live Trace Options using the image I found of Ashitaka:

Default Trace

Low Fidelity Trace

Greyscale Trace