The Area Blog

A few people have asked about how the Les Petits Pilous flyer was made, so heres a quick run through.

As always, we start by coming up with a concept. Colour and details arent important at this stage. We put down a sketch and get started.

So next step is to lay out the lettering, we take a lot of care as this is the base we will be working from.

We colour the lettering consitantly, the first thoughts about light and shading need to be adressed here, so we add a slight gradient to each letter.

We carefully draw in the shapes around each letter to acheive the 3d effect, measuring depth consistency all the time.

We align all the shapes and make any necessary adjustments to the letter positioning.

Now we brush in all the shadows by hand. This can be done many ways, we prefer to use a very low opacity brush in Photoshop with the multiply blend mode. Thinking about light direction is important here.

We do the same thing for the highlights, this time using the screen blend mode. Once this is done we add the cast shadows which really brings the text to life. We add some colour adjustments to make the text pop.

For the rollercoaster, we start by drawing out the track forms.

Next we add the track boards. To do this we draw a board in illustrator and warp, scale and sheer it to fit the contours of the track.

We start adding some background elements, in this case some stars to give the piece more atmosphere. We add shading to the track to give it more depth.

Now we add some of the foreground elements. The track which we blur and fade out and the shape of the cart.

We draw the characters separately in Illustrator and place them in the cart.

We add shading to the cart and incude the boize noize sign in the background.

Finally we add some glow to the background and a load of custom colour adjustments. (gradient maps, curves, colour balances etc)

Final Flyer