Persons of Note: Creating the poster

When it came to creating the poster I was quite stuck for actual ideas although the concepts came quite easy to me. I knew I wanted to potray the sheer strength of Ali as an individual and came up with a few ideas that just didnt see poster worthy to me. My first idea I actually liked was based on the idea of a optometrist's reading board, and I was going to create something that got harder to read as you went down it. However when I drew it out it looked more like a postcard than anything else.  

I went with the best idea I had, which was a diagram of Ali's fighting style and trying to show how he was always faster than the other person. I drew this out in ink to keep up with the rest of the series. 

When I brought it into photoshop I knew that it wasn't going to be the main final piece. 

Instead I found a picture of Ali and using the wacom tablet and the colour palette I went about colouring over the top of the image in blocks to show the light and dark to reflect his attitude (as I have talked about Ali's attitude was very black and white).

Then I placed the scan in of pencil I had done earlier and placed it as a background so it kept a sense of hand draw too it rather than completely digitialised.

 As I worked more on the drawing it felt too boring to just have a pencil background. This is when I brought in the fighting style of Ali into the background as one of the layers and inverted it so it was white. 

Knowing how to use layers came in handy here, I feel like i've gotten much more comfortable with using them just lately and using a wacom tablet really helped the drawing process. 

I scanned in a quote and thought that I had my final piece, however it still didn't feel finished to me. It felt too bottom heavy. 

I messed around with layers and the idea of bringing the fighting style to the foreground and Ali being a shape in the background. I felt like it was too dark though. 

 This lead me to creating a lighter version of it, in this version I copied the pencilling layer over Ali's body and made the background back to it's original state.

When I lined them all up together I still liked the middle one more than the pencil copies. 

 However I knew that the text was weighing it down too much. I started writing out some more phrases in ink and scanning them in.

I then brought them into the photoshop file and used the "screen" layer so that they showed up as white on the background. 

This was the one I thought was going to be the final but I didn't feel like the quote was noticeable enough and it needed to really say something powerful. 

This was the final version that I came out with. I do feel that it has a slight book cover feel to it but it definitely gets across that feeling of strength and I think that the quote really makes the poster as well as the inking of his name. 

Theres very little I would change to this if I were to do it again, maybe trying to be abit tidier with the colouring in but overall I was really pleased.