Team RadTASTIC’s radio show poster! Obviously all is not well wherever this DJ is broadcasting from…
It’s the zombie apocalypse, and this is the last radio station you’re bound to pick up for a long, long while.
With that as the theme of our team’s radio drama, I immediately thought of creating an in-context poster for our show instead of an advertisement that could presumably be used to advertise for our show. I wanted to create a beat-up poster that looked distressed and torn, like it’d really been through hell, and it was a blast getting it just right.
First I had to design the original poster. I guess some of the design elements from my Movie Trading Card were still puttering around in my brain, hence the blue-and-gold theme. Not a bad choice, since I had to pick colors that were distinct and easy to read, but that would also clearly show the blood splatters I wanted to put in later. I chose a font that was also really clear and blocky to reflect the top-ten-hits theme of our fictional radio station and added a lightning bolt to the tail of the “R” with the paths tool (something else I had to look up—like the heart monitor line from my first attempt at this assignment, a lightning bolt is a really specific cultural image). Our team came up with the station name “WRTZ” during our second meeting; RTZ stands for “RadTASTIC Zombies,” and the “W” is generally found in front of FM radio station titles. I decided on the band “106.5″ because it reflects the name of our class, and because we have 5 people on our team. DJ Matt and the call-in requests come up in our show’s script and worked excellently as a way to fill up the bottom part of the poster, as well as giving me something to play with symbolically (more on that later). Finally I slapped on a generic radio tagline onto the image in a configuration that mirrored the lightning bolt, stuck a random lens flare filter in to create some contrast, and moved on to messing it up.
Over the summer I downloaded a ton of GIMP brushes from DeviantART in an attempt to incorporate the feel of traditional art mediums into my digital art. The majority of them are worthless, but they do give you some interesting edges if you pick and choose them correctly. I flattened my image, added an Alpha channel to create transparency and stuck a picture of some bricks I’d taken earlier that week behind the poster. Then I chose a brush with funky edges and went about creating a “burned” look for the bottom of the poster. I painted in some dark brown crispy bits, then erased away the rest with my weird brush, making it look like some of the poster was missing. I used a few other wonky brushes to dirty it up a bit, and then added rips in the poster with yet another weird-edged brush. I’m really proud of the rips, actually—I erased the poster layer with a brush that had uneven edges, then created another layer between the bricks and the poster. On that layer I used the same brush to paint in just a little hint of white around the torn edges, the same thing you’d seen on a torn piece of colored paper. I put one of the rips through “HITS” to emphasize the violence of that word, and the second one through Matt’s name. I’ll let you guess why I made that particular design choice; needless to say it’ll all become clear once you listen to the show. ; )
Finally, the blood splatters. I was so relieved to find a simple, straightforward blood splatter tutorial for GIMP, and fiddled with it until I had just a suggestion of serious violence—not enough blood to overwhelm the poster, but enough to clearly indicate that All Is Not Well wherever WRTZ is playing.
Overall, despite how abysmally late this thing is, I don’t think I’ve ever created a piece of visual art I’m more proud of. I LOVE the way it looks and the way it clearly evokes the idea of a post-apocalyptic scenario by playing into well-known cultural tropes. I never like the stuff I’ve made, and while I would absolutely go back to fiddle with it and make it perfect, this is definitely a created thing I’m proud to call mine. : D
