The Walking Dead Season 5 Poster Process

Hey All,

I thought that I would cap off all of my process videos by providing you with a breakdown of how I created this Walking Dead poster image. Up until now, I've shared a few time lapse videos but this time I will share how I got from point A to point B.

To start off with a spent a lot of time photo comping and rearranging various images trying to come up with a pleasing arrangement. I ended up setting on a nice triangular composition with that included almost all of the Hero's cast from season 5 as well a few zombie to indicate the threat and motivation in the overall narrative. You can't make a zombie movie poster without zombies in it!

I didn't keep many of these photo comps but what I do have is the initial pencil drawing. I had originally thought about putting a border around this image as a bit of a homage to some of my drew Struzan posters but in the end, my wife talked me out of it and I think that she was right.

 Next, I painted in some background color and texture. The show in general has a real saturated, green/ sepia tone to it and I wanted to start off and paint into a nice ground that conveyed that gritty, dirty, blue world.

 Here I am laying in all the local colors with an airbrush ( Photo shop) just like I would do it traditionally. The goal here is to give me an indication of the basic colors and forms and how they will interplay with one another.

 

This next image is a halfway done process shot. I've completed the rendering of about half the characters and really it is all just labor from here on out. Rick himself took me about 7-8 hours to paint. The time lapse condensed it into a nice 4 minute chunk but I ended up putting a lot of time into this piece.

 Final Image. Once all the rendering was done, I added the text and a few embellishments to the composition. I ended up making several minor adjustments in photo shop to harmonize the color scheme a bit more and "amp" up the piece in general. Photo shop really does have several "Make it Better" buttons. ;)

Well that is it in a nutshell. If you have any questions or comments on this piece and/ or my process, please drop me a line as I'd love to hear from you.

Cheers.