Medieval Macabre Poster Final

Well, we finally came to a consensus on the Medieval Macabre poster. The Producer came over to my house and sat with me as we went through a bunch of stock images until we finally found an image of an iron skull which seemed to express the characteristic feeling that she wanted for the show.

Here is a little bit about the process of creating the poster. I first put the stock image in place exactly as it was, and came up with a type solution which I reused from my earlier design of this poster with the Dance Macabre.

I then cut a square piece of the texture from the main part of the skull and created a repeating pattern from it. To do this my typical process is to cut a 500x500 pixel or larger square of the texture I want to use. I then make a second copy of the texture onto another layer. On the first layer I run a high pass filter with default settings to even out the lights and darks in the texture. I then apply the second copy of the texture as a Color mode layer on top of the High Pass version to return some of the original color to the texture. I merge these two layers together, and then use an Offset filter to offset the pattern by half of its length and width. Then, I use the clone tool, or healing brush tools to clone over the sharp edges which are now offset to the center of the texture. I then run the Offset filter again with the same values, and Voilà, I have a tiling texture.

Once I had my texture, I created a new copy of the layer with the skull image and painted in the rest of the tombstone by using the eyedropper tool to select values from the skull, and the airbrush to paint the lines. I set up a second layer above the layer I was painting on and filled it with the skull texture set to Overlay mode. I then held down the option key and clicked the line between the layers so that the layer with my texture only showed through where I had painted the rest of the tombstone. I then pasted the original skull back in another layer and faded the edges so that my painted layer and the original skull image flowed together seamlessly. After a lot of painting, and some color adjustments, I was able to achieve an extension of the original skull image that looked fairly realistic.

I then took my type layers and applied a deep, hard chiseled Bevel and Emboss layer effect, and also applied my same skull texture as a Pattern Overlay layer effect (also on Overlay mode). This helped bring the text and image together so that they looked like they were from the same world and the type did not overpower the image.

Anyway, the poster ended up being fairly quick to produce once we had settled on a design. I was able to finish the image and apply it to all the promo materials in about half a day. The best part is that the Producer loves it. One of the board members for the group told me that he loved how it looked dark and evil, and was chortling in glee while he said it. I love making people happy with my art.