Design yourself some “hope” with Affinity Designer
SHEPPARD FAIREY’S FAMOUS, maybe even iconic, poster from the 2008 US presidential election became so well known it even has its own Wikipedia entry. The original is based on a 2006 photo by former Associated Press freelance photographer Mannie Garcia, and a version of it was added to the Smithsonian collection in 2009. Showing Barack Obama in blue, red, and beige, the original wording was “Progress,” but it was changed to “Hope” before release.
In these times of international turmoil, we could all do with a little hope, so here’s how to recreate the poster’s look with your own photo. We’re going to use Affinity Designer for this, Serif’s vector design tool that’s been out on the Mac for some time, but has recently come to Windows, and is available as a free beta. We’ll use Photoshop for some steps, and you could achieve the same final result with Adobe Illustrator. Affinity also has a photo-editing app on Mac, but it hasn’t come to Windows yet—though we have reason to hope it’s on its way.
1 REDUCE COLORS Once you’ve chosen a suitable photo of someone looking rugged, wise beyond their years, and perhaps a little sensitive (we couldn’t find one like that, but this shot of Tuan was conveniently on our desktop), you need to reduce the number of colors in it. Open the file in Photoshop, and select “Posterize” from “Image > Adjustments.” We chose five levels [ Image A]. 2 SEPARATE INTO PARTS From here, we need to separate the image into its constituent parts. If you’ve got a week to spare, you can go round all the edges with the Pen tool, and draw a path around each area of color. There is a quicker way, however: Color Range. Head to “Select > Color Range,” and use the dropper tool to select one of the colors in your image [ Image B]. We set the Fuzziness slider to 50, so it picks up dark and light shades of our chosen color. Hit “OK,” then use Refine Edge to smooth your selection. You need to do this for each of the colors Posterize produced, saving each selection as a path each time (click the button at the bottom of the Paths palette to turn a selection into a separate path). Rename your paths with their color as you go, otherwise it’s going to get really confusing. We’ve separated the white part of Tuan’s face from the background here, by hand, so it stands out more later. 3 SAVE PATHS AS NEW DOCUMENTS Affinity is a little finicky about importing paths from Photoshop. You need to convert them into shapes before exporting. Select the path at the top of your palette, then the Pen tool from the toolbar. Set your foreground color to the same as the color layer, or something close, then head to the top of the interface, where the tool-specific options live, and click the button marked “Shape.” Create a new document the same size as your original, and copy your new shape layer into it. Save the document as a PSD file with the name of the color. Do this for every path you created, making a new document each time. 4 CONVERT TO CURVES Open Affinity and create a new document. Size isn’t hugely important, as vector art is resolution-independent, so we went for A4. Save it, then open one of your PSD files. This sent our quad-core i7 into a bit of a frenzy, and we had time to go off for a drink while it thought about it, but eventually your PSD will open, layers intact, on a separate tab to your blank document. Select the shape you created in the last step, then click “Convert to Curves” at the top of the interface [ This is important, as
Affinity finds its own curves much easier to work with than the paths exported by Photoshop, and moving and resizing the shape becomes a jerky mess that’s hard on the CPU fan if you don’t do it. Copy your newly curve-converted shape into your new document, and resize it so it fills the space. Repeat for every PSD you created. 5 TWEAK COLORS You’ll now have your artwork approximately recreated in Affinity, but with every section, and therefore color, on a separate layer. The beauty of vector graphics is that nothing is set in stone, so we can select each layer and alter its color if we want. One of our original layers was a bit too yellow for our tastes, so we’re going to alter it to red, to better match the Obama poster. The red and blue background needs to be duplicated, too, which we can do with just two rectangles. 6 CREATE COLORED RECTANGLES Create a new layer and place it at the bottom of your stack. Choose the rectangle tool from the toolbar on the right, then drag a rectangle that completely fills, in fact overspills, your artwork. Keep it selected, then head to the “Fill” section of the tool-specific options palette at the top of the interface. Click the dropper, keep the mouse button held down, then drag it over the red color in your artwork, and release. It doesn’t snap into red immediately, though—you need to click the red dot that’s appeared next to the dropper first. Drag out a new rectangle that’s the full height, but only about half the width, position it to the left (go to “View > Show Grid” if you need help), and use the same dropper to sample the blue color from your composition, and color your rectangle with it [ Image D]. 7 FINISHING TOUCHES Now, all that’s left is to use the text tool to add whatever message you like. We were going to go with “Hope,” but felt “Tuan” was enough of a positive slogan for us [ Image E]. As a finishing touch, you can shift the layers slightly to change the way they overlap, adding a hand-printed look to it. Save your work, then export it to share with the world.