STAR WARS COVER FOR THE VALLEY ADVOCATE

Well, I've got a few days to do a cover design for the local weekly, celebrating the glorious 30th anniversary of Star Wars. It's due Monday morning, and I am starting on it the Thursday before. I was going to go cartoony, maybe even do a little MAD magazine-parody, but the writers weren't into it. So I went with a classic portrait/collage approach, but stylize it in some crappy Standard Design way that will inevitably involve big blobby halftones. I have decided to avoid the temptation to draw Darth Vader hovering over everything, and I'm just gonna draw the good guys. Come, follow me on this magical journey.

First, my sketches. As you can plainly see, I don't really sketch much, because I already know I'm gonna work heavily from source photos, and at this point i'm recalling from memory classic poses/shots that I might be able to use, such as Leia crouched over R2, or the non-movie but well-known shot of luke looking into the sky of Tatooine with his macrobinoculars. Wow that was a long sentence.

Anyway, I can't draw.

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Thursday starts with the collage. Roughly cut out and all pixely and jpeg compressed. This is laid out in the final PSD file at full resolution. It's easier for me to work on stuff on the "final canvas" in case i need to refer back to the orig. layout. Makes for bigger files. This PSD got up to 150MB before I rationalized it down. Most of these shots are from HD or DVD screencaps I googled, because due to time constraints i don't have time to screencap my own stuff. besides, these are much better resolution than i'd be capable of grabbing myself. The X-Wing is a toy. I had to change some of my choices based on availability. I fiddled for awhile and settled on this. In retrospect I might like this Han Solo better than the one I eventually went with (I sort of like how he and Leia lean into the center), but I need to just forge ahead to make the deadline. DRAT.

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Here comes the tracing part. I haul the PSD into Illustrator and sit around at a coffeeshop for a few hours manhandling my Wacom. I don't worry about drawing it well because that'll just slow me down. I'm a busy man. Haw haw. The lineart is sliced into three layers: The X-wing (to go over the paper's masthead logo thing), the background dudes (chewie, ben, C3) and the rest. I'm not sure if I'll need that much "control" but I do it anyway.

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Back into Photoshop, I start fucking around. I think this is terrible. Absolutely terrible. But that's sort of how I tend to work. I dig myself a deep hole, and then try to crawl out before the deadline. This is why I am such an angry tense handsome man. Please note the prerequisite halftones. The background guys look like a funny constellation map. "I see Chewbacca!"

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Things slightly improve here. Got some highlights, some lowlights, a little less halftone, a little less-gross color. This is where I get to on Friday. Job is due Monday morning.

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I pushed the background dudes sufficiently back (in order to get a logo over them legibly), hacked out a lot of the halftone, added a nice Death Star explosion behind Han to balance the page out a little better, and I obviously tried messing around with quotes from the movie textured in all over. I am not sold on that idea, but I feel like I'm a little ahead of schedule so I'm trying it out. I dunno if the Star Wars logo will stay, but that's probably where the name of the lead story will go. I assume secondary text will run along R2-D2's lower lip, so I don't want to busy it up there too much, either. Han still looks terrible. Luke, though he is the center of the piece, has received almost no attention. Leia is looking all right to me. Fuck those background dudes!

So even though I originally envisioned something rather flat and simple, I am currently knee-deep in something very layered and texture-y. At this point it's a crapshoot. I might try shutting off some layers and see what I think of a "clean" version.

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Closeup of lousy tracing job - errr, I mean loose sketching. Right now, Leia's face is made up of

1. the Illustrator lineart, masked with different colors
2. a high-contrast, blurred, halftoned shadow, toned
3. a different high contrast blurred highlight/white halftone
4. a teeny bit of the original photo collage
5. a lil drawing over it
6. about five adjustment layers and/or color layers with a mysterious combination of transparency settings. I have no idea where they are or what they do. Usually my PSDs are pretty organized. This one is sort of a mess.

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3.5 hours at a coffee place later:

Saturday: Stripped away a lot of the junk. I actually stripped it almost all the way back down to the linework and then started building it up again. The halftones on there now are cobbled together from about 6 or 7 differently contrasted versions of that original collage. I fiddled around with the linework a bit, coloring it in a pseudo-split fountain sort of thing in some spots. The text, though completely different, I'm still not sold on at all, but I am compelled to try.

Next up is to fiddle with color a bit more. this monochrome blue thing was just the first idea i had. Not married to it, and i still have 36 hours til deadline to mess 'round.

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4 hours, 1 cookie, 1 battery later.

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Indecision creeps into my soul.

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Another couple of hours and I'm about ready to call it quits.

I keep leaning towards the blue version. I got rid of the stars, tried to basically wipe away the last of the texture-y thing i originally started with. ha. That Advocate logo is FPO (scanned in from an issue I had kicking around). I think there are some good things about this black/blue version (I like how Han sinks into the background), but I still like the all-blue sucker better. I'm gonna rationalize the hell out of ol' Blue-y and get it knocked down to 3 layers - art, Star Wars logo, x-wing - and deliver it.

final delivered art - At the last minute, I decided to add a border and put a subtle shadow on the Star Wars Logo.

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final cover - Text and logo added by the newspaper staff. That "At 30" is a little more Battlestar Galactica than Star Wars, but I am not here to judge. Heh.

Live long and prosper!