Pretty Little Liars Poster

After fiddling around in Photoshop for several hours, I was able to complete a poster for the TV series "Pretty Little Liars". This took a lot of thought and brainstorming in order to achieve a result I was happy with! Here it is



Before creating my final draft,I did another poster that was similar but not entirely the same. I wasn't completely happy with the way my first one came out so I went back to the drawing board and thought of a different way to position text, searched for better fonts and tried to develop a better image overall.




Here are the two images side by side and I believe the one on the right is significantly better than the one on the left. The poster on the left doesn't look well put together and looks like it didn't require a lot of work.



The reason why I chose to do a poster for "Pretty Little Liars" is because I follow the show religiously and I am waiting to find out who "redcoat" is in the show (hence why the redcoat is emphasized in my poster).To get inspiration for my work, I watched some teaser trailers to get a better idea on how I was going to generate something mysterious.I found that the existing posters did not match the vibe I was going for.Here's one of the teasers I watched:



My sketches for this assignment look like this:



(I apologize for the rough, amateur stick figures drawing isn't my strength) As you can see, I paid attention to what the poster was going to contain. I didn't plan out the fonts and placement of text since I thought it would be more efficient to do some trial and error in Photoshop.



Once I was completed my photo-shoot at the cemetery, and finished my sketches, I was ready to get going.



The first thing I did was isolate the red jacket and desaturate the background. The focus of my poster is "redcoat" the character so I tried to make it as evident as possible.Next, I started playing around with blur and effects. I went through all the filters in the drop down box and felt hard light gave a sharper and cleaner appearance.



Now it was time to start thinking how I was going to get a perfect looking "A" across my page. I wanted it to be smudged out and feathered so I went on dafont.com to try and find what I was looking for. I found a font called "lipstick traces" and was super excited since it was exactly what I wanted. However, when I placed the "A" overtop of my photo it didn't look right. It didn't look very appealing and was out of place. Since it's the first thing that catches your attention, I wanted it to stand out more. Then, a wonderful idea hit me. I decided to draw the letter "A" on a piece of blank paper with red lipstick and smudge it with my fingers.



After smudging it I scanned the image, selected what I needed and positioned it where I thought would be best.I then added a linear burn and adjusted the opacity to this layer so it wouldn't be too harsh.



Lastly, I paid attention to the typography. I decided to use the original line from my first poster, "it's not over yet ". I adjusted the opacity and added bevel and emboss, as well as inner glow.For the title "Pretty Little Liars", I added a drop shop shadow to give it a little bit more dimension than the other text. For the line at the bottom referring to when and where to watch this episode, I added the stroke effect to the text to make it stand out against the grass. I stuck to pretty basic colours because I wanted the emphasis to be on the middle of the picture. I experimented with many different hues, but black and white were definitely the best options in this case.



And that pretty much sums up my first assignment for BDC192!



Blog to you next week,



Christina
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