A couple weeks ago I spoke about movie poster illustration I started in the General Illustration II class I’m taking.  Since then I’ve made quite a bit of progress on this project and I’m happy with where it is going, I thought I’d share a little more about it.

I chose the movie Hocus Pocus for my movie poster. Before starting the actual movie poster I spent a significant amount of time trying to perfect my thumbnail sketches and create a composition that works well. This also included hand-lettering that would go on the poster. I had a couple ideas for this project but I ending up going with my idea to illustrate the spell book from the movie with two hands grabbing the book to fight over it. One hand is meant to be an old, witchy looking hand while the other one is just an ordinary human hand. Then my plan for the background is just to show a sunrise to symbolize that once the sun comes up, the witches could turn to dust and lose their chance of becoming immortal.

Once I had this idea planned out I began drawing the composition out on drawing paper with pencil. Then I went over my drawing with a black illustration marker and scanned it into my computer so I could work with the drawing in illustrator. For a while I kept going back and forth on what medium I wanted to use for this project. At first I was pretty set on using acrylic paint, but then I changed my mind and decided to work mostly digitally. For the background I used watercolors to try to create a sunrise to symbolize death. I still have a lot of smaller details to add onto the spell book, but this is what I’ve come up with so far.