3.1 Developing the Sketch for the Concert Flyer

Welcome back to event flyer design. My name is Kirk Nelson, and we are beginning the second project of this course, which is the concert flyer. This is lesson number 11, where we start brainstorming, sketching, and planning out the design for this concert flyer. Now, I wanted to make sure that this project was substantially different from the techniques that's shown in the first sports flyer design. I didn't want to simply repeat the same techniques with a different topic. So, this concert flyer design is going to be less photo illustration and more straight up illustration and effects work. Instead of starting with our own original photography, I'm actually going to develop some sketches from some stock images. Now unfortunately, I do not have permission to distribute the stock images that I used to develop my sketches, but I went to a couple of stock image sites. Like dollarphotoclub.com and freeimages.com and just downloaded some comp sizes on some of them. I actually purchased the dollar photo club imagery on some of these and the free image one is actually just free for download. But, unfortunately, I can't distribute them. If you would like to download these yourself, I've included a links file, so that you could follow these links, just to grab them yourself. So, I started with the thumbnails blank.pst that is available in the course files. And you'll recognize this just blank sheet of canvas with a bunch of rectangles on it, probably from the first project that we did. This is just a means of starting to loosen up. And getting ready to start designing something. I envisioned each one of these frames just to be another thumbnail sketch. Just a way of exploring different ideas and working through some different thoughts and beginning to nail down those design decisions. So begin with a new layer and grab your brush tool. Remember we did this before. And grab the Pencil preset. And then begin just developing some sketches. Really quick, really fast, just working out some ideas. And that's what I've done here. I've gone through each one of these frames and just added a quick thumbnail sketch using those stock images as a reference and just working with some different ideas. And experimented with a couple of different types of names and different compositions and positioning of the figures. And ultimately, I came to the decision that I like the figures with the hair flying around. I think it adds a lot of really good energy, and a sense of movement and motion to the different compositions. I find the ones that she's just sitting static or even standing still tends to feel rather static and still and they don't have a lot of energy and life to them. And also the type of effect that I wanna go for is very, almost electric and neon. And having her hair flying out like this reminds me of some of those static electricity effects that we see sometimes. So I kinda liked that idea of it too. And ultimately, I opted for this type of positioning in thumbnail. I didn't like the name of the band that I came up with, The Electric Sound. I wanted to go with Light Noise, so I'll probably do that. But ultimately, I prefer this type of composition. So I've got the starter guides.psd. Remember, we developed this file in a previous project. So I've got my outside bleed set up. I've got my title save frame set up and I've got my rules of thirds. Now, I want this project to be portrait orientation instead of landscape. So I'm going to take that and I'm going to rotate the image 90 degrees and then add in some new layers for sketching. And here's the sketch work that I ended up with. Now I did change things very slightly from the thumbnail sketch and notice I tilted her positioning back. So the entire figure is angled a little bit more. I think that adds a little more dynamic interest and energy, and by tilting her head back some it actually give a little bit more space for the title of, over here in the title safe area. I will admit to develop the sketch like this I did use some of the stock energy to really kind of help me with this. Let me show you what I mean there by opening up the stock folder in this one, and I'm going to hide the rest right now. So I took this one as a base image, because I like the positioning, I like the way the hair is flying, but I actually preferred the facial shot and the direction of the hair flow from this other piece of stock. Where I simply cut out that top area and positioned it over here. I didn't spend a lot of time comping these two together. Clearly it's not anywhere close to seamless because it doesn't need to be. I'm only using it as a reference to then sketch over. And that's what I ended up with. So, if you're not feeling very confident in your drawing ability, just use a couple pieces of stick imagery to help augment your line creation until you can develop your skills enough that you don't really need to rely on that. And it's just for sketching anyway, and it just helps to get you more into the project, build up your confidence for some of these artistic ventures. Before we go further, I want to show you one really quick little technique that can help you somewhat in positioning different elements while you're working with the sketch. You may find you don't like some of the positioning. Maybe you don't like where the arm, or the shoulder, or the way the head is tilted back. It can be a little intimidating to try to correct that by erasing those lines, and having to redraw them. Here's a great little trick. If you take all your sketch layers. I do tend to use a lot cuz I like to separate things out between the hair and the guitar and the model there. But anyway, once I get that all done if you create a merged copy of these. So I'm going to hold down CTRL+ALT+E, that's CMD+OPT+E on the Macintosh. You end up with a merged copy up here. If this ends up just being the lines without a white background in it, you will need to create a new layer underneath it, fill it with white, and then combine the two together with CTRL or CMD+E. Because, what we're going to do next is the Puppet Warp, and that's under the Edit command. Puppet Warp and this is a great little feature for helping to position things in your sketching if you don't want to resketch. First, nail down, say, an anchor point. Right here. Put another anchor over towards the other shoulder. And then a couple down here to make sure things kind of stay in place. And then let's say we want to move her head a little bit. So I've got the shoulders and around the neck area anchored down. I've got a new anchor pen up there. I can begin moving things around a little. Now there will be a little bit of distortion so you can always change the mode from rigid to distort to help fix any of that. Or, you can add more pins in and continue to readjust. And, because it's just your sketch, you don't have to worry too much about the distortion or the pixelation. And, then finally afterwards, I did rough in some title text. I was certain to reveal the title-safe guides that we have there. So used a similar technique as I did in the first project, but in that first project I did have the fill completely zeroed out on these. That didn't really work, the words kinda got lost in her hair here. So, I want to increase the fill again even though I do have a nice heavy stroke layer style on there. I think having the fill completed in this helps make it stand out a little bit more. Font wise I'm using a font called Blessed Day, which is a nice little script type font that I think works really well with the movement in the lines that I've established in this composition. All right guys, that's it for this lesson. We've gone through and we've worked with a couple of ideas. We did some thumbnail sketching, and we developed a more full complete sketch. Next lesson, we'll begin with the glowing lines effect. You're gonna like that, it's really a lot of fun.