Applied Illustration: Working in Gouache and creating the poster

I took the advice from the crit and started to work in gouache, I found that it was a lot easier to work with ink (didn't smudge as bad or ripple the page) and the colour was brighter. I started working in predominately red and white, when I asked about using another colour, other students disagreed and said that red and white was more unified. I soon created a series of small scamps that I would then take to photoshop to put in the A3 template i'd created. 

As I was getting to the end I realised I hadn't done very much character development for Hades, I went back to look at some research material. I wanted Hades to be the bad ass of the fifties, so he definitely had to have a motorcycle. My go to motorcycle brand was a Harley Davison (because what else would the Lord of The Underworld be driving?) so I looked into who was driving them at the time and what they were wearing. Elvis owned a Harley and he wore a lot of leather whilst still looking quite tidy, I also looked at Anke Eve Goldman's work. Anke - Eve was a famous german photographer at the time and she specialised in taking photographs of motorbikes. I really liked her style but it also gave me lots of reference images. From these I decided that Hades was going to ride a Sportster 1957 Harley, I drew him with black goggle/sunglasses to make him a little more anonymous when we are first introduced to him. 

As the other characters are all introduced on the first page, Hades got his own small introduction at the end of the book. It's the only text apart from the introductions in the book, this was down mostly to the size of the publication but also because i felt like too many words would ruin it and I wanted it to speak for itself which I think it does. 

I had decided that I wanted a poster to be included in the small comic book package I was making, but i decided to really compact it, having the comic book in a sown in hotdog (like the one I saw at the print fair) but with instructions to cut the thread after reading so that the A3 back of it would then be a poster that people could put around their rooms and keep after reading the story (by it being a hotdog means it could be transformed back into the story at anytime). 

After I had sorted all the storyboarding out for the comic, I decided that the ending would be the poster bit (where Hades rides off into the sunset with Persephone after saving her from Apollo and Hermes). This was the bit I struggled with most as I needed it to look more like a poster than just an extra section of the comic. 
I decided to create some background patterns, I created two designs and put each of them behind a picture of Hades and Persephone on the bike. The first being an oval with small forks and flames in to signify Hades presence, and the second just being flames (for hades) and leaves (for persephone). I liked them both so would probably just release it as edition 1 and edition 2 so people had the choice of the poster design they received. 

The decision to bring teal into the poster was just a suggestion by another student who felt like it would be a nice break from all of the red. I tried it out and liked it, I had also created my own font for the comic but for the poster I wanted something a little more stylised so picked a fifties - centred font. I chose the words "highway to hell" as it played on the song which everyone has heard but also the fact that Hades takes Persephone to the Underworld in the original version, so it gives people an inkling of whats going to happen next in the comic.