Paint a classic film poster

Andreas Bennwik uses digital and trad techniques.

For this workshop I’ll paint a retro film poster-style illustration. Posters used to be painted or airbrushed on canvas or illustration board, and I’ll use a technique inspired by the great Drew Struzan. It’s based on airbrush painting with acrylic colours to build up the colour and shadings, and then colour pencils for rendering out the lighter parts and adding details. For this I usually use the same mediums, but here I’ll be doing a mix of traditional and digital. Often an illustration needs to be changed during or after the process – working digitally makes this significantly easier.

Starting off with a traditional drawing on paper, I’ll do the colouring and final rendering in Photoshop as well as adding different textures and so on. But first we need to get the idea and composition done. Each step is equally important to get the end result we want. Since it’s a classic 1980s fantasy film theme, I’ll make a composition of some of the famous characters from the era, keeping in mind where the text and titles are to be placed on the cover.

Researching reference pictures with the ImagineFX team is crucial as they need to be instantly recognisable. I usually come up with an idea, make a rough sketch, move on to the drawing, scan it and do the colouring in Photoshop. The colour scheme is a classic blue and orange-yellow theme that’s often used in film posters.