Today I want to talk a little bit about the process of making the Copter Air Traxx poster. I wanted to design a retro inspired drone. I was looking at the atomic age, midcentury modern time period.
References
I like to use Pinterest for the initial reference search. It's a great way to just quickly collect images and view them all together.
After that, I usually pick the most relevant images and put them together in a
Pure Ref board. Pure Ref is a fantastic tool for having all your reference images in one place and being able to quickly access them. Here are some of the images I decided to use as inspiration for my drone design. You'll notice I used references from cartoons, vintage illustrations, real life drones, architecture and vehicle and prop designs.
3D Model
I decided to explore different design options in 3D and I wanted to learn how to use
Blender so I used this project as my learning platform. Designing in 3D is great because you can easily evaluate your design from all kinds of different angles. I usually tend to find new designs just by tumbling around the current design I did so I find it very useful. Some plug-ins I used during the design process were Decal and Mesh Machine, both available here:
https://blendermarket.com/creators/machin3
I used
Vray Next as my renderer of choice because I knew I wanted an outlined, graphic looking render and Vray Next would allow me to do that very easily. I used Vray Next's toon shading for the outline and I used a falloff map to achieve this graphic look that you see here:
Vray Next is incredibly fast. If you haven't had a chance to try it out yet -I highly recommend it. I use the interactive render option to dial in my lighting and shaders. I use the Vray SampleRate render element to analyze and optimize my render settings. In previous Vray versions I would go into the local subdivisions of my shaders and lights to arrive at the most optimized render settings but with Vray Next, I noticed I didn't have to do that. It did it automatically for me. That was another huge time saver for me!
Poster Design
Now that I had the drone, I needed to work on the poster design. I looked at a lot of different retro ads from the 1950s and 60s and came up with a couple of different layout options. I also played around with a lot of different fonts because that time period is so iconic in regards to its' typography, it's very important to get that right.
Here are some of the different layout options I explored:
In the end I decided to go with my first layout design. I liked the scale of the drone and all the elements felt the most balanced to me.
The final touches were all done in Photoshop. To get that faded, vintage look I used actions, brushes and textures from the Atomica Kit, available at
truegrittexturesupply.com. This kit has everything you need to distress and grunge up your artwork and it's incredibly easy and fast to use. It also comes with different halftone brushes which is what I used to get that halftone effect in my image.
Here is a breakdown:
And then here is the final image:
Thank you so much for stopping by. I hope you enjoyed this process write-up and stay tuned for more Atomic County.
Sonja
