Movie Poster Design with Adobe Photoshop

1. Introduction Movie Poster: Can you think of anything cooler to design than a movie poster. This course is for you if you want to learn some cool compositing techniques in Adobe Photoshop and geek out about some amazing movie posters. I'm Martin, I have over 20 years of experience as a graphic designer, illustrator, and Adobe certified instructor. I have worked with companies like BBC, Disney, Google, Ikea, and I cannot wait to share my best practices with you. This is a streamlined hands on course focusing on a real life design project. I will be walking you through everything step by step, and you will get all the exercise files so you can follow along. In case you prefer not to copy me. You can also follow my workflow using alternative assets provided and create something completely unique that you can showcase in your creative portfolio. I am pretty sure this course will inspire you to create something amazing. First, we will explore the role of a poster, common layouts used in the movie industry and the importance of thumbnails for finding the right composition. We will then jump into Photoshop to create an alternative poster for an existing movie. I will be using the iPad version of Photoshop, but you can follow along using the desktop version using the same techniques and features. Besides all the technical stuff, we will also cover some important graphic design theory that you will be able to apply in any of your future creative projects. You can join this course without any prior knowledge in graphic design illustration or Adobe applications. But to complete the project, you will need access to Adobe Creative Cloud and the desktop or laptop computer. But now, it's time to start creating, so I will see you in the next lesson. 2. Theory poster design: Posters are the most common promotional products in print design. There are lots of different categories and types. Depending on the promotional subject, the main categories are movie posters, advertisement posters, awareness posters, and event posters. The most important thing about posters is that they need to be eye catching and engaging. You want people walking on the street to stop and look at your poster for at least a couple of seconds until they find the relevant information they are looking for, like when a movie is coming out, when and where an event is happening? Why should they buy a product or a service that is advertised? Or what is the main message in case of an awareness poster? Now, typically, posters use a combination of typography and imagery or illustration. In some cases, one of these elements can be more dominant than others. Like in case of these posters here, a few of them uses mainly typography. While in other examples like some of these superhero movie posters, where it's the image that takes center stage. On this board, you will be able to find lots of examples thematically organized. And part of these examples, we analyze further in the other parts of this course. But there's a couple of general things you can notice. Looking at them from this distance is that most of the time posters would be in portray format. Although the aspect ratio can slightly vary, this is probably the most successful format. In poster design. However, when it comes to adverts in magazines, for instance, they can take two pages or a full spread, and in this case, they would be more landscape format. And although these are ads within magazines, they still can be considered as posters because they are very similar in format. And in case of billboards, which are the largest format prints for poster design, you would be working in this panoramic horizontal aspect ratio. Another common thing that you can see in most of these posters is that they utilize contrast, whether it comes down to color or tonal contrast. And a few examples that really stand out would be this poster here or another poster right here or another one in the awareness category. Essentially posters that use black and white would be the highest in contrast. And remember, the main aim of a poster is to grab people's attention. So this is one of the methods that you can utilize. But whether it is by using contrast or other methods, a good way of testing your design and whether it's effective or not is to actually look at it from this distance. This is what we would normally call a thumbnail size. So even in this size, your poster should work. Of course, you won't be able to read the details, but you should be able to understand what the poster is about and have a general feel about it. You will see that some of these posters, even from this distance are still successful in conveying the main message, either by using large typography, high contrast or large imagery. But another important thing to keep in mind is that although you are trying to put as much information in a poster, you should never fill up all the available space completely. So make sure to let your design breathe by including negative space or wide space. And for this, we can again see some amazing examples. Of these illustrated versions of the original star wars trilogy by Olimos or the Bathtu posters for the Oscars in 2016 by Lavante Sabo. But even animation posters would commonly utilize negative space in the designs, which helps to give a much clearer and faster read of the composition, which is probably even more important for younger audience where the attention span is even less than an adult. Good technique, whenever you are designing posters, is to actually start in this small thumbnail size and come up with various ideas before you commit to one and refine it into the final detailed version. This interesting and fun series by Gabqere shows how some of the iconic movie posters can even be recognized by overly simplifying them into these extremely minimalist designs. Try to time yourself to see how quickly you can recognize all these posters. And in case you cannot figure out what they are, you can always check out the link here on the board where you will be able to find this illustration and also other work by the artist. You may have seen these examples already, but this is also a great example of showing, how certain compositions work really well for posters, in this case, for movie posters. So these are the very commonly seen cliches, like the silhouette of a person from behind, whether they are looking away or maybe looking back towards us or seeing people from the side standing back to back, very commonly used for romcoms. The use of black white and red or orange for action movies, mainly and close up view of the main actors in a movie or having big heads on the top, and then beaches at the bottom. This is also interesting that's very commonly used for drama category, again, which involves romance. And it shows that the seaside is a great metaphor for longing and romance. So now that we talked in general about poster design. In the next couple of videos, I'm going to go into detail analyzing first a few superhero movie posters and comparing them to each other, seeing how the compositions can be more effective. And after that, we will take a look at a crowd sourcing competition that was for an illustrated movie poster for the movie Godzilla. 3. Ranking superhero posters: You can learn a lot about composition and layout used for movie posters by analyzing existing posters and comparing them to each other. In this video, I'm going to take a close look at some of Marvel's superhero movie posters, and what we can learn from some of the weaker or less successful compositions. Let's get started with number ten. So this is the worst one on the list. And it's no surprise that it is the Spider Man homecoming. You probably are familiar with this, and it was a very controversial design. The colors are off. The balance is off, and most importantly, the proportions are off. We have floating heads, especially Tony Stark here on the right side. So he's lichly just floating around in space, which makes him look really odd, and the general composition fails mainly because of that, I would say. I want to just quickly mention that, of course, every movie comes with multiple different versions of posters. And this was just one of many. We have another version, which I think works much better already. Less characters, but they form a really interesting composition. It's very dynamic. It's also in terms of colors, works much better. But let's move on to number nine. I chose Batman versus Superman, the Don of Justice poster. First of all, one of the biggest problems I have with this poster is that it is very static. So in general sense, it is not a bad composition, or it would be quite a good composition because it forms a triangle. The three main characters forms a triangle, sort of, which is not bad. But then here are the problems with that. First of all, we have Batman completely lost. So we don't have a good silhouette of him. He is actually the only thing we properly see of him is this silhouette. The problem with that silhouette is that we don't even see properly the ears, which are so crucial to Batman, to his character, to see his character. And that is a big problem. So if I just draw this back again. This is all we see of him. Then if I draw the outline of Superman, we see sort of something like this. We can't see much more because the cape is so dark, it's sort of lost in the background. So again, even though they tried to show the cape, which is a very important detail for superman, it is lost because of the darkness and the general atmosphere or mood that they created with the colors. So once again, silhouette is really bad. One of the other biggest problems that I have with this poster, it is hard to tell where the horizon is because we have a very bright spot here. We can't actually say this is the horizon. And because there is the sword of Wonder Woman, that actually is very misleading. It almost feels like when you first look at this poster, almost feels like that is the horizon, something like that. But then this line here wouldn't work, so you would feel like something is off. And in a general sense, I feel like the perspective is really poor in this composition. We have sort of a dent in the buildings here in the background, which I can't really say for certain that we have in the foreground, like Superman should be standing something like that, if that was the angle. But he's actually standing more like this. There's a contradiction between the background and foreground and even the foreground, this pedestal or whatever they are standing on is a very distinct perspective we have here, so we can see that defined. And to be honest, even one woman standing close to the edge of this doesn't really feel grounded in this perspective. So I would say she should be standing something like that. So the leg should be something like that to feel like she is in that perspective. Obviously, I'm just making very rough notes here. But hopefully you can see what I mean. So they feel like they are just put together, stacked on this background, and the background is also just sort of placed in there to make it work and giving some depth. So yeah, I'm really not happy with the general perspective and the composition as well in this poster. And just out of interest, if I flip it around, it helps to see it with a fresh eye. We have a lot of details and things going on on one side, while the other side is very empty. Sometimes when you have a composition out of balance can create tension, but in this case, I don't think it worked well enough. So even though this poster has the potential to be great, unfortunately, it fails on many different levels. And that's why I counted as number nine on my list. But let's move on to number eight. So the X man poster that I chose the last stand is an interesting one. We have a lineup of characters all looking at us and walking towards us with Wolverine in the center, you can see that when I have the center lines, he is pretty much exactly in the center, although we have a slight tilt in the composition. So if we were to have them straight, it would be something like that, which would make it a little bit too static, I guess, and that's why they chose the subtle angle. But the problem with subtlety sometimes is that it falls short. So if they wanted to create a diagonal composition, they should have added a little bit more of an angle. So something like that or even maybe more of an angle would have made it more interesting and more dynamic. But then the biggest problem for me is the background. So we have a very flat boring background. And again, the clouds don't really feel like they are in the same perspective as the characters. So we have a very strong venishing point going somewhere around there, and the sky just doesn't follow that. So if we were to see the same thing in the sky, the clouds should be receding towards that point, but they are really flat and they don't follow this perspective at all. Another problem that I have with this image, and we can see that really well, if I turn on this adjustment, the threshold adjustment, which creates a more graphic look of the poster is that we have a very strong contrast on a character that's not really relevant. I don't even know the name of this character, but the guy with the wings, he is the one really that is the focus point or focal point of the composition because that's where we have the biggest contrast. So once again, if you look at the threshold option. Of course, we have contrast on Wolverine and storm. But as you can see, the guy with the wings who stands out because of his wings, and of course, also because of his naked upper body. Here's another issue. When you have things overlapped on top of each other. Like in this case, we have a lot of characters, you have to be very careful how you place them, making sure that the silhouette again is not lost. One of the most important characteristic features of Wolverine are obviously the close. So we have the close in here and we have them here. If you blur your vision and look at the poster, you won't necessarily be able to see those clothes. And there's a reason for that because it is very closely aligned to the wings and in brightness and color, it is almost exactly the same as the wings. So when you blur your vision, these clothes here on the right will get sort of merged together with the wings of that character. Again, he is one of the main problems that I have with this poster. And on the left side, the highlights of the cap that Storm is wearing, again, is sort of blending together with the clothes. So this was number eight, but let's move on to number seven, which is another DC Comics poster. The Justice League, again had lots of different posters, and some of them are brilliant, like this one, which is much more successful to the one that I just showed you before. But coming back to this one, My main problem here is that the poster is just too closrophobic. All the characters are really squashed together. It makes it feel weird and odd to have them standing that close to each other in the first place. But then there's also the issue with the lighting that they chose a specific lighting for Batman, making sure that we can't see the eyes. So they are lit with a very strong light coming from above, and that creates the shadows over the eyes. And we can see that on all of them. But this lighting is not really helping in general. Apart from making Batman look menacing. It doesn't really help Wonder Woman or any of the other characters to be honest. But another thing that I wanted to mention about this poster that still is a little bit forced, in my opinion, is the actual typography. So we have a very condensed font, but then it has these characters replaced with the symbols of each of these superheroes. So we have the S for superman, we have Bat symbol for Batman, Wonder Woman's W, and so on and so forth. I don't want to go through all of them. It's smart that they managed to put them all into one sentence. But in my opinion, it ended up being really forced. But again, this is number seven, so let's move on to number six, which is the IMN poster from 2008. First of all, this is getting definitely better. So if I were to make notes here, so we have a very strong sense of diagonal lines. So let me just draw a few more of them. So in general, this is what we can see in the composition immediately. So this is emphasized by the rocket lines that we have here on the right, and then we have also the planes going that direction and also generally the placement of the faces. But then if we look at the composition with the center lines, Again, quite a strong differentiation between the two sides of the poster, we have Man really close up of him on one side, and then we have all the rest of the characters and details on the other side. It is also interesting to have a look at this composition with the golden spiral. If you're not familiar with the spiral, this is based on the Fibonacci sequence, which is sequence of numbers. Artists have been using for a long time to create engaging compositions. If a poster is following the golden spiral, then normally here around this point is where you place your focal point. Now, if we see it like this, we can clearly see that the focal point is iron man's mask. And if it's on the other side, then it sort of shows Tony Stark. Also, it's worth mentioning that when you're using the spiral, this line is quite important, and it is actually used for placing her character and aligning her exactly to that line. And another important line in the composition would be this one, which again, helps to direct attention to this character here at the bottom. In terms of composition, I think this poster is doing well. But the reason I chose it to be number six on the list is because there's a couple of additional things that I don't think work as well, like the lighting. So we have a very strong lighting or most of the characters coming from the right side, which is fine. But then her characters lighting has also a very strong light coming from this angle. And both sides to be honest. So that doesn't really match. And then obviously here with the Man suit has a completely different lighting. It's more like a back light. But my biggest concern and the reason why it didn't go higher on the list is this negative space in the design. So it just has a very big gap in the center of the composition, and it is not really an interesting division between the two sides of the poster. So what I mean, they would have been able to make it a little bit more clever, the way the two sides collide instead of just leaving a huge gap there in the middle. But yeah, so in a nutshell, this is not a bad poster. It's getting better, but let's move on to the next one in the list. So that's number five, and we have the first Thor movie poster from 2011. Now, what I love about this poster is that we have a sense of action Thor landing on the ground. It is a perfect comic book, superhero pose, and we have an amazing silhouette of him. So a really well defined silhouette. We can see the hammer as well clearly. So it's just really well defined. And plus we have in the background, all of these concrete slabs flying, which again, creates that explosion and sense of movement that he just arrived and everything is shattering around him. But what further emphasizes this movement are the vertical lines that we have dividing the faces above. So these lines again help to achieve that movement that he's arriving on the ground and everything is shattering around him. But even though it's a great composition here at the bottom, so I love this area, I'm not too fond of the details here on the top. My biggest problem with the upper third of the composition, which we can check by having the rule of thirds on, which divides the composition both vertically and horizontally into thirds. We have the characters too tight, again, cropped into this frame, the individual frames we have there. Yes, we can argue that this is a great way of getting really the attention to the eyes, so they are all staring at us, which is great, but it doesn't really give a good outline to them. And I would say the worst is Loki's character where he's not even centered within that space that he has. So there's more space on the right than on the left. And we can hardly recognize him because of the light and the colors, and in general, that tight crop that I mentioned before. So even though the bottom two third of the poster is doing really well, the top third is not as great, and that's why, in general, I couldn't give this poster a better ranking than number five on the list. But let's move on to number four. Which I chose the Avengers Age of Ultram poster from 2015, and we are getting very close to the first three. So here what I love mainly is the perspective that we have. It's a very tricky perspective. So we are looking at them from below, and we have a very interesting circular composition. So when you look at everything in the image, you will get these curves, so you will notice them. So that's first of all, the perspective was set up like that, but also all the alignment of the characters. And even here in the background, all of these things are placed in a way that we get that circular composition. And it is a really tricky one to get right. Even the ball here, and even the big mostly arm of hulk is further emphasizing that curved look. So because it is a very tricky perspective to pull off. And because they managed to do it right, I think this deserves a really high opposition in the list for ranking these posters. And the main reason why this didn't make it to my first three is this area around here. I feel is probably the weakest of the whole composition. So Black Widow and IM Man sort of gets merged together, there's not a clear division there. So we can see a very clear division between Captain America and IM Man. But as I sat here on the left side, that's sort of lost that line there. And this is an unfortunate placement because when you have things so closely aligned to each other, they almost feel like she's holding that letter, and I'm sure that wasn't the intention. So you have to be very careful with these things. Why thing would have worked much better if they had her a little bit phase more like there, so the arm is going this way, and that actually would allow her other arm as well, maybe to come a bit further down. And as I said, have a little bit more distinction there would have made it work better in my opinion. And just one other thing about depth and perspective, I think Nick Furious character is the one that doesn't really integrate with the rest of the character. So even these characters here in the background work really well in terms of the composition. I'm not even sure whether he's supposed to be in front of Hawkeye or behind him, let's just zoom a little bit closer to this. Hawkeyes quiver and Bow is clearly in front of Nick Fury. So that makes it look like he's in the background, so he's behind. But because once again, we don't have a clear distinction here, and his shoulder is almost perfectly aligned with the quiver and outline of Hawkeye. This again is a bit confusing here. So just like we had that confusing outline around here. To be honest, this is still better than that one in the background. But these two confusing outlines make that corner the weakest while I love what's going up here with this spiral or whirlpool that we get from all those curve lines. And now we are ready to move on to the first three. But before I show you them, I wanted to show you a few special achievements. So I gave the awards to these posters because what they managed to achieve. First of all, we have the Avengers Infinity War. And now you might be upset that this is not my first or even second or third, It is an amazing poster, but I gave it the special award of being the poster that managed to pull off the most difficult thing to have so many characters on it at the same time and still work as a composition. And there's another version of the same poster where we have this cool distinction of the characters into groups by using the light emitting from the central avengers logo. Again, it is doing a really good job. So these lines are both cropping details. Like here, we can clearly see it. But also we have details coming out of those frames. So that's really smart. Again, we have a strong crop here, but then details coming out of the frame. Again, cropped there crop there, but then details coming out, and so on and so forth again here, we have the strong crop. But then the heads are popping out of the frame. So that is a very smart composition, again, with a lot of characters in it. And last but not least, I wanted to also show as a special achievement, the complete opposite of this is the N Man and the wasp poster, which is coming out soon. It's not even out yet. But I was really astonished by the poster when I first seen it in the cinema and realized that we have the two characters, the tiny characters here in the poster. So if I zoom closer, we will see them better, but because it's a low resolution version of the poster, we Can't really see much detail there. So this is the ultimate negative space in a movie poster I've ever seen. So obviously, the title is really big. But compared to that, there's nothing else going on. So all this background is empty, and we have the tiny little characters there. And they actually chose to put the characters in the center and a little bit higher than the center point. So the vertical center is here. But the actual visual center normally is a little bit higher around 60% within the poster. So that's what they chose, it seems like, which is a good placement for that. And just to show that, obviously, there's another version of the same poster, where we have all the characters, and by the way, this is a really cool diagonal composition. Remember the X man where they force that tilt on the characters, and they try to get the diagonal composition going on like that. Here, we have the character standing straight, but the holding devices and these crops are creating that diagonal action, which I think works so much better. But still, you can see the little characters there in the poster. So it uses what we've seen in the one with the negative space, but also manages to put all the additional characters in it. Really smart, clever poster. I love it. Now that we talked about these, let's move on to number three. So the third one that I chose is the Civil War, Captain America Civil War. And there's a couple of reasons why I pick this one as number three. First of all, it is an amazing symmetrical composition. So it really works for this title because we have the two opposing sides, also having a hierarchy from the most important characters to the less and less important ones in the background. If I bring up the golden spiral, you will see that it was again used perfectly in this case, having the focal point on man's eye or like his gaze, which is the most important one. So this is really a face off. They are staring at each other. So the two main focal point will be the eyes. So that's Tony Stark's gaze, if we are looking at it from this side, and obviously we get the same one on the left side because of the symmetrical composition. So that is working brilliantly. Even the subtitle, United we stand divided we fall is equal on the left and the right side. So they really paid attention to a lot of details here. We also have the different colors in the background. We have the blue, and then the red again, for the two opposing sides. Not to mention that these colors are complimentary colors. So if we look at the color heel, we have the reds and on the opposite side, we have the blues, so that again, creates that strong contrast in terms of colors as well. Although I love this one, Let's move on to the second one. This is the Guardians of the Galaxy volume two. This is a very graphic poster with a lot of things going on similar to the infinitive W. But in my opinion, this is better because of the overall composition. So first of all, we have obviously that big circle in the background. So that is already a nice framing for the whole composition. Then we also have the star. So if I just reduce the opacity of this, you can see it really well showing in the composition. And because of the main character is Star Lord, and obviously, the whole thing is in space, that just really works and emphasizes the story. But apart from the shapes that we can see here, we have a very cool dynamic composition, with a lot of things going on, but still working a very strong perspective, everything going centrally to the center of the image. So if we bring up the center lines, you can see that composition working there. And then if I bring up the rule of thirds, that again shows us the interesting focal points. So we have drags exactly placed in one of the first most important focal points if we are looking at it from the rule of thirds point of view. So the top left is usually the first one that most viewers would jump to. Then we have this one here, which is, well, sort of it is grout, to be honest. So this focal point would be around grout, and then we have the bottom two points, the gun that Rocket is holding, and then I don't want to go into more detail the other point is pointing at. But yes, so in general, this is a brilliant composition. I love it to bits. And most importantly, I love the poses of these characters. For example, Star Lord has that cool, almost like a dance move that he's doing there, which works perfectly with his character. And if you just remember going back, to what we've seen before, like in this case, these poses are just so stiff and static compared to what we see here. Of course, you can argue that the Batman versus Superman wants to show that depressing, dark atmosphere that goes with the story while this one is a very colorful and upbeat poster. But still, because we are talking about superhero movie posters, poses that we get in the characters are very important and the silhouettes and outlines. So even though it's so colorful and bursting with detail, we can still get an amazing outline of all of these characters, and they have a very interesting dynamic pose on all of them. And yes, we arrive to the point that I can reveal the overall winner of this contest. But before I show you that, I wanted to quickly show you without damaging your eyes, the worst superhero movie poster ever made in my opinion. This one is just really bad on a lot of levels. I don't even want to go into listing the issues that I have with this, but feel free to comment if you think there are worse movie posters than this. But without any further delay, harsh contrast in terms of composition and excellence here is the overall winner. Drum roll, and let's turn on the Thor Ragnaroc poster. Again, you might not be happy with my choice. You might think that there are better posters. Again, feel free to comment if you have a better idea or a choice for the best superhero movie poster. But the reason I chose this is because first of all, we have nine rings in the composition that can be interpreted as the nine words. So we have Asgard, Midgard, Nil Pi, Masplheim and so and so forth, from the Scandinavian folklore. Then we also have a reference to the tree of life or Udrasil which in this case, we presented with these details that look more like branches here on the top, and then we have the trunk down there. So a very simplified way of showing you where the tree is in the composition. And on top of all of this, we have a really cool 80s vibe also that obviously was present in the film as well. But they managed to get that right using this type or treatment that we have on the type, the colors in general, and these funky outlines that we have on these containers. Now, even though I pick this as the overall winner, of course, you can argue that it has its flows. So, for example, these very strong black lines in the background, in my opinion, are a little bit too strong and they sort of gap blended in with the head gear that the villain is wearing, also they sort of resemble the radioactive sign, which might be a reference to the gnarc end of the world or maybe not. But I just feel like this is a little bit too strong in terms of the overall composition. Plus, also we have this strange shape going across the composition, which is the only thing that is not symmetrical. Or the only dominant detail that is not symmetric also, we don't see another shape going this way. This might be useful to break up the whole symmetry, but I feel like again, it's a little bit too overpowering, especially around here. So on the bottom, around this part, it looks fine, but here it's a little bit overpowering, especially because it's sharing the same color as hulk. So even though it's an amazing poster, There are a couple of flaws. But overall, I don't want to be too critical because I love this poster, and to be honest, most of these posters, I really admire and love. Even the last one in the list, I think it has its merits, and I don't want to come across harsh or negative about any of the things that I mentioned. 4. Poster Design Contest: This video is for you if you like illustrated posters of huge monsters and would like to learn about compositional techniques and graphic design principles. I'm going to take a close look at a recent art competition hosted by Talent House, where the task was to create illustrated posters for the Godzilla King of the Monsters movie. I will analyze the five winning posters and also some of my personal favorites from the hundreds of submissions. We have this amazing competition and some brilliant artwork submissions that we will go through. First of all, let's see what was in the brief. So, most importantly, they were looking for an illustration, digital painting or alternative poster design, which is a captivating and imaginative poster that can help to promote the movie. Now, the main reference for the style and inspirations were these posters that were obviously created for the movie. These were all the official artwork. And then a couple of restrictions that they mentioned that Godzilla shall not speak any human language in the posters. Also, Godzilla shall not be killed, so he shouldn't be dead in the poster, and also Godzillas use shall not be derogatory to its image. And from a stylistic point, it's important that Godzilla should be depicted with scaly skin, four fingers on each two hands and four toes on each two feet. The arm should be short and three rows of fins along the back. It's still three rows like in the previous design. But obviously, it should be with the new fin version, which we can see it already here in this poster. Now, whoever entered this competition could download these images. These four posters were the main references included. These posters also show really well the four monsters or Kaiju. So we have Rodan, we have King Gidora and we have Mothra besides Godzilla. By the way, I really like these posters, they all show the scale really well. So there's always indication of something that we can relate to. And then in comparison to that, we see the scale of these monsters. And also, I love the way they use these monochromatic colors. So we get a sense of each of these characters nature. And also, they are very well color coded in the film as well. So these colors actually come back in the film. I don't want to spoil it. So you should watch it if you haven't seen it already. These original posters are great. Now, let's take a look at the selected winners. So here we have the five posters side by side with the names of the artists underneath them. And I would say out of all of these, probably my favorite is this one from Gus Murtha. Which is a really nice composition, but also I love the flow in this poster. So we have the flames flowing in the background, leading the eye from Godzilla to Kingdora even these details here in the foreground, which I guess are either scales or it could be even rubble or buildings, or I'm not exactly sure what that is. But again, there's a nice diagonal composition that leads from one side to the other. My only comment would be that the heads are overlapping. So we can clearly see this head here, which is great. This is where the highest contrast is by the way, and we can also make out this head. But even this head is overlapping the neck. So there is already a bit of an overlap issue here, but there's definitely a big overlap issue on the left side. So where Godzilla's head is completely covering up the third head. The character on the right, Didora, having three heads is obviously a very important element of the design. So that should be a slightly bit more emphasized in my opinion. But apart from that, again, I love the style itself, and I really like the fact that we go completely black on some details. So the artist only had to indicate certain areas instead of creating a texture on the whole body and even on the wings, we have indications of texture and detail, but not covering fully everything. And that is a very hard thing to do. So when you're doing illustrations, the least amount of details you can use to indicate something is usually the best. So instead of adding so much detail, try to simplify your designs, and here's an amazing example of that when it works. Now, these are the other four selected winners for the competition, although I like them, I'm not 100% sure whether they were the best to select. Let me go through again, pros and cons. First of all, let's start with Chris Ramirez' work here on the left. The general style is really cool and I like the colors used. But I'm not too keen on the actual monster designs. Again, we have some overlap issues. For example, Godzillas hand, Being on a tangent, so completely aligned to Gdora's wings. This building here on the left almost perfectly aligning or following the shape of Godzilla's leg. Also, I feel like the proportions of perspective is a little bit strange. Godzilla's perspective would indicate that we are looking at the scene from below, which is the normal way of looking at it. But then Gidora feels like it's much smaller. It doesn't have that perspective or scale. So even though the heads and the height would indicate that this monster is taller and bigger, somehow the perspective just doesn't perceive that. This is a very tricky thing to do, and you have to make sure you get the perspective right if you want to include two main characters in the poster. I whenever you are doing illustrations, just make sure you think about these relations. Moving on to the second poster, I again, really like that there's only small indications of details and there's big empty area all around. Then It's an interesting concept to have all the other monsters present. So we have Motra here at the bottom. I guess we have Rodents win maybe here on the right, and then we have also Gidora here on the left, one of the heads. But it is so abstract and so simple or minimalist that I'm not 100% sure what I'm looking at. And also the general outline is a bit strange. So if you just look at the outline itself, Again, it doesn't really mean anything. There's no smart play on negative space or any special thing that I can see could be a merit of this design. Maybe it's just me and I don't see something that is hidden in this poster and maybe it's just too clever for me. But generally, I feel like although it's a nice concept, it could have been elevated if it was a little bit more laid out. Now, to the right, we have Pablo's design. And here, compared to the previous one, we have a really smart use of negative space. So using these big bulky fins in the new Godzilla design, the artists managed to squeeze in all the additional characters. So it's amazing that we have Gidora here, then we have Rodents heat here, and then we have Mtra here underneath. And additionally, obviously, we see Godzillas outline. So this silhouette reads really well and it shows everything, all the characters important for the movie. Out of these four, I think that one is a very smart and nicely executed design, clearly relying mainly on negative space. Finally, we have the last design here on the right from tuck, which has a nice symmetrical composition. So we have monster on the left, a monster on the right, and we can see the colors used. Again, the monochromatic theme from the main posters. We have the oranges on the left, and then we have the blues on the right, representing each of the monsters. Apart from all of this, we also have this big burst in the middle, which has all these lines coming out, emanating from the center, creating again interest and movement in the composition. So again, it's a great composition, nice execution. Although having said that, I'm not 100% keen on the shading on some details. So especially around here on the legs and the tail, Some of the shading details could be improved a bit and even here around the next. So it's not bad, but it could have been slightly better. Again, great designs all of them, and I'm not saying they didn't deserve to be selected as winners. But now, let me show you a couple of additional entries or submissions that, in my opinion, could have easily deserved to be selected as winners. These are just a few highlights from the hundreds of submissions. The reason I selected them is because they really stand out in terms of their composition or style, or they just simply being very creative. Now, normally, when I look at the design, the first thing I look at is the idea, so how creative it is, how unique it is. And then second, how good is the composition. So you can have an amazing idea. But if the composition fails, then nothing is going to really save your poster. And then third and also, of course, a very important element, the actual execution. So the quality of the final details and the general design. So based on these three things, I usually judge every design. So let's take a closer look at each of these, and I'm going to again tell you my opinion and pros and cons. So we have, first of all, a really cool symmetrical design here, again, showing all the monsters, and here we can clearly see the three lines of fins on Godzilla. And that's actually one of the best scenes from the movie, and we can see Gzila coming towards us under the water again spoiler er there. But that's one of my favorite scenes or shots from the movie. And this illustration captures that really well. So I love that detail there at the bottom. Now, just to come back to what I said, I think the creative idea and composition is brilliant here. However, the execution could have been slightly better. I think the bottom half of the design, So this part works really well, while the top area is slightly weaker. So again, the shading is mainly what I'm concerned about. It's a bit too flat, also, especially road and is very flat compared to the other characters. So that should have been a little bit more detailed in my opinion. Now, moving on, we have another great example of a unique style. It's more like a comic book style. And I love the way half toes were used here. So when we zoom closer, you can probably see this better. So we have the little dots, which is more like that printing technique. If you're familiar with it. Where we have the dots representing each of the colors used. But this is obviously a really nice treatment. And also, I really like the pose, and especially, I love the waves. They are really nicely detailed. And even the treatment and style of the title, I think is really good. Also, we have a nice overlap with the hand coming over the type and gzila standing in front of the sun. These details both creating nice sense of depth, and generally, the colors work really nicely as well. So overall, I think this is a brilliant poster. Moving on here, we have another very creative poster. Instead of showing any of the monsters, we only see a footprint, and although it doesn't really look like Godzillas footprint, because as we talked about it, in the original design, it looked more like I would say, probably something like that. I think as they mentioned in the brief, it should be four clothes or toes. It would be more something like that. But still, I really like this composition. And I love the way that even the names of the monsters are represented as locations or points of interest on the map. We can even see the highway names, although they don't really mean anything, but that's also a nice touch. But most importantly, this is actually something on the water, so it's like a deep crater filled with water, and the elevation shows how deep we go in. Of course, the underwater world is very important for the movie. That's a really nice touch. Instead of showing something like a mountain, we are actually seeing a deep sea elevation. Now, this submission is a great example of an extremely unique and creative idea, a good composition, but something that is lacking in execution. It's not bad. Again, I'm saying the illustration itself is good, but it was just a little bit overcooked in photoshop. There's too much effects, and the main problem, I think, is that it lost focus. The whole thing is lacking focus on crucial details. Of course, as you can see, this design resembles more of a stained glass church window where Godzilla looks more like a St., very unique and smart. As I said, the composition and the idea is just brilliant. I think if it was rendered or colored differently, it could have been also a winner for sure. At least if I was judging. Now, this composition, of course, can also be slightly risky to have a religious connotation to something like Godzilla. And I'm not sure whether that would have worked well, internationally, especially. So it could be slightly sensitive to do this. But I think it's not like 100% obvious what religion it would be used in. Of course, it's more resembling Christian stained glass window designs, and maybe that's why it wasn't selected as a winner. As I said, again, it might be slightly sensitive topic. But going back to the quality or the treatment that I think was a little bit overcooked, it's mainly the blurriness and also, there's a lot of effects going on instead of focusing on the important details. I think especially Godzilla's body should have deserved a little bit more high contrast detail, making sure that things like the hands are clearly separating from the body, because at the moment, that's not really the case. And also, I feel like the type here at the bottom really clashes with the whole design. So maybe this could have been done again, more like part of the stained glass window. Also, I'm not sure why the artist included the signature here in the middle almost like a water mark, But I guess that's not big of a deal. That's probably something just to protect the artwork if someone is trying to steal it. Moving on here, we have another really cool example. This one is actually a lino print. If you're not familiar with the technique, we actually have a video in our 365 days of creativity series where Shome shows you how to use this method to create prints, and then turned that into a pattern. If you're interested, check out that quick 1 minute video, which will show you exactly how this is done. But of course, in this example, the artist used this technique and created a very unique Treatment, which is more traditional media than digital. I'm not sure whether it was touched up or improved digitally, but it's a really nice example of again, a unique composition but also a unique media. Now, I'm not sure why it wasn't selected as a winner. Maybe because the monsters look quite different from the designs in the movie. But maybe it was just overlooked because there was literally hundreds of submissions. Anyway, I think this is just a great design, great composition and great final treatment. And there's a really cool detail here. I'm not sure if you notice, Godzilla grabbing Gdoras tongue. I just love that design, so I just remove my mark from there so you can see it better. And this is also a good example of showing that even when we work with the three heads, there can be a way to show all three of them without having overlap por tangent issues. One thing that I'm not too keen about is this UFO here on the top. I'm not sure whether that's actually works with the story, and maybe that was one of the reasons why this wasn't selected, but also the planets, not really sure about those, they are probably not needed. Instead, it would have been good to include Rod, the other monster because we only have three of the monsters here. Maybe Rodan is also there somewhere I just can't find it, but this would be my only negative criticism for this otherwise amazing poster. Here we have another very different and unique poster, extremely simplistic or minimalist, but it and smart, especially the smarter the bottom where it says. You can actually see the scale difference between a person and all the rest of the monsters. It almost works like an infographic where you can clearly see the size of these monsters and the differences between them. Although it's a minimalist design, it still has some nice textures and grunge details around the edges, which works well. Although there's only two colors, I think they are really well selected, gives enough contrast and white, red and black, even though with black, we only have a little bit of detail here on the side. It's a very strong combination, and it works well because it's almost like a warning. So these colors definitely work for that to grab the attention and to warn us about the monsters Now, in terms of illustration, this poster does probably the best depiction of Godzilla. So it's a great design. Lots of details went into it, and it really represents well, the new version, again, with all the new fins and the proportions and everything. And also, even the environment, I really like the clouds, the lightning and the smoke, the buildings, the destruction in the back and how Godzilla is enveloped in the clouds and is emerging from it. So I think this is a great illustration, mainly in terms of execution. The only argument against it would be that it's a little bit too simple for a composition, and also we don't see much action going on. It's quite static in a way. Again, going back to the three things that we talked about. In terms of the treatment, the third aspect, this is superb, but in terms of composition and creative concept, it's a bit lacking. And last but not least we have an example, which again, is totally unique. Concept is very unique. The composition is great, and also the treatment is brilliant. This, I would say, definitely would have deserved to be selected as a winner. It feels almost like a wire frame or like an instructional manual, the actual graphic style itself. But then we have all the monsters present. We have a really interesting diagonal composition again, which is almost like a V shape. So we have these lines coming, and again, directing the viewer's eye to the center, and that is where Godzillas head is. So really nicely leading there. All these leading lines are directing our eyes to go in the center. And also, this artist took the time to redesign the title for this style and really nicely incorporating it into the full composition. And if you are looking for Godzilla's name, which would normally be sitting here on top, it's actually here on the side. So we have it both in Japanese. And in English. And we also have the other names here. So it's really nicely presented. We even have some additional information which just works well with this instructional menu or style, so we can see that the size is explained here, and then we even have the monarch logo there on the top plus a made up page number here on the bottom right. So all in all, I think this is again a winning design in my personal opinion. So here we have again a few of my personal favorites from this competition. But if you want to check out all the other submissions, I highly recommend to follow the link from the description below and go to submissions, where you will be able to go through all the hundreds of entries, either based on the popular vote because people can vote on each other's designs. So if you choose the selected ones, the most liked posters will come up. And obviously, the selected artists are also here on the top. By the way, the judges normally on talent house don't choose based on the popular votes, so don't get confused by that. But you can also search by which ones are the most recent ones. Of course, this is a close competition, so don't try to submit your work because the binners were already selected and it's finished. The whole point of this review was to learn from all the entries and to go through a couple of design principles and illustration ideas which can hopefully help you and inspire you to do something and also maybe to motivate you entering competitions in the future, either on talent house or other sites like 99 designs. 5. Joker project: For the project of this course, I chose the movie Joker, but you don't have to stick to this film. You can follow along and work with the same images that I will be showing in this workflow or feel free to be creative and pick other images from the board that I included. Or alternatively, you can also pick a completely different movie, collect the images that you can work with and create a composition, either in the same style that I'm using or you can be again, creative and come up with a completely unique look. These type of compositions are best put together in photoshop. But just to mix things up a bit, I'm actually going to use the iPad. So I will be working with Photoshop on the iPad. However, if you don't have an iPad, don't worry. You can just work on Photoshop on the desktop and follow along using the same techniques. Now, to get started, I am just simply going to create a new document, and I will work with an A four portray size for a white background. So these are just default settings. And once I have my document ready, I will bring in the images that I'm going to work with. Starting with the hero image that's going to be the central piece of the composition. So I already have these images downloaded or uploaded on my iPad, so I can just go to photos, and from the album that I prepared, I will pick this first image. Once it's placed onto the canvas, I can just tap on done on the top right corner to accept the placement, and it shows up as a separate new layer. Now, for the selection, the best one to use would definitely be select subject. You can access this by double tapping on your selection tool, then tap on select subject, and it will make the selection already, which we can refine because I see this pool being added to the selection that we can remove by using the other tool called object selection. So this is the second one just after the Lasso tool. And to remove from the current selection, I just make sure that this third option is highlighted. And then simply draw over that shape and wait for photoshop to refine the edge. Now, I feel like it works perfectly. So we can turn this into a mask with the option here at the bottom, and that creates a layer mask from the selection. If I double tap on the mask thumbnail in the layer spanel, I can have a look at the mask itself. And I can see that this part here needs a little bit of refinement for which I can use the brush tool, and I'm just going to increase the hardness of this brush and paint over the edges that I don't need. So I can just refine this quickly and zooming out. I can take a look at the rest of the details, and I feel like it looks quite good. So once again, I can just tap on the layer mask to go back to seeing my selected image. No matter what images you end up working with, usually, it is always best to start with subject selection and then refining it with the other selection tools, and at the end, once you have a mask, you can further refine small details by just simply using the brush tool. 6. Adding shapes to the composition: So we jumped ahead a bit and we have the three masks ready for all the three pauses. So if I select any of these, I can still show how it looks with the background by using this icon here on the right. Again, this one as well, we can see nothing is lost at this point. So we have still everything, all the details on the layers. We just hit them with the layer masks. There's one thing I really miss in the current version of Photoshop for iPad, and that is smart objects. So at this point, before resizing and rotating these layers, what I would do is to turn them into smart objects if I were on the desktop version. But unfortunately here, we don't have them yet. I know it is coming or planned to be introduced later on. So in a future update, hopefully soon we will get it. But at this moment, we will have to keep on working like this. And the reason why I'm really missing smart objects is because by resizing and rotating these layers, I know I'm losing some quality. So I'm a bit more careful, but I already know the composition of what I need to do, so I can just simply use the move tool or select tool and I can move these layers around. So I'm going to put this one here on the left. I'm going to move this one here. Slightly down to somewhere around here. I think that's roughly the composition I used before. I'm just going to zoom out a bit and see if we need to move a little bit everything down. I think it's roughly in the right position. I'm going to select all three layers. When you drag right on the layers, you can select them all, and then using the move tool now, we can move them together. But also, we can resize them with the second tool. So I just go back. The second one from the top is the free transform tool with which we can resize the whole thing a bit. I think something slightly even smaller will work for this poster, yes, something like that. I'm going to click on done. And then now we can start adding some shapes. For this, I'm going to create a new layer. So tap the little plus sign here. And then on this layer, again, I'm going to use the Lasso tool. And with the Lasso tool, we will draw the shape that we need. I'm just going to try to draw it similarly to what I've done before. Let's try this again. Yeah, something like that, like a bean shape. I am going to fill this with a color. Now for the color, I'm going to pick a color from the image for now. It doesn't really matter we can change it later. That's going to be fine. I'm going to deselect this now, and I will move this layer further down. I think I have it somewhere around here. So just simply change the stacking order, and then we can move this slightly down, somewhere around there. Now, the first thing that I wanted to do here is to create depth, and we already have an indication of that by having this character here behind the shape while the other two characters are in front. To make this more interesting, the character on the right, so this one, I would like to have that clipped into this shape. So all we have to do for that is to create a selection of the shape. So we can do that from going into the menu and choose load as selection so that creates a selection based on the shape. This would be commando control, click on the layer thumbnail on the desktop version. But it's pretty much the same thing here. And then after this, I go into the layer on the right, select the mask and I'm going to invert the selection. Here at the bottom, we can tap on invert. Now everything is selected above the shape. Now we can use the brush tool, maybe make it a little bit bigger and just paint over around the edge. Now I'm going to change my brush back to the normal hard round brush, and then we can just get rid of all of that. We are masking out those details, and this helps to make it look like the character on the right is standing within this shape. We can now choose D select. I think we can move the main character down a bit. Yeah. Something like that is more similar to the way I've created before. Now, I would like to place a scene into this shape. For that, I'm going to bring in another image. Go into my album, this scene, I think is a very recognizable scene from the movie. I'm going to just maybe a bit smaller. Something like that, tap done, and then I'm going to place it just above the shape. Let's just drag this down just above the shape. And then this is the icon here on the right to create a clipping mask, so I can turn it off, turn it back on. And what I want to do is to have Joker visible on the left, but I also want to see the guy on the right. So they were quite important in the whole story. I want to make sure that they are both visible, and it's a quite nice way of having two interesting details within the same shape. But then have the characters in the middle divide the composition. But I don't want this to be too strong, so I don't want it to be in its original colors. I would like to use a gradient on it. So first of all, what we can do is using these properties here, the layer properties. Having this layer selected, I can change already the blend mode. Maybe I can change it to overlay. Now, this is going to mix the colors of this layer with the colors of the shape, which could work really well. And at this point, I can select the layer itself, and use a clipped adjustment to change the colors. Remember I said the original colors doesn't really matter because I'm going to change it anyway. So add clipped adjustment here in the layer properties and then choose hue saturation. Now notice that there's only a limited amount of adjustment layers here, not as many as what you would get on the desktop, but most of them are here. One thing I'm really missing is the curves. But hopefully that will be edited soon as well. For now, I'm just going to click on hue saturation, and with this, I can start to change the hue. So you can see already we can experiment with different colors. And I think I'm going to go with something along the lines of that. Now, at this point, also, I'm going to change the background color. I'd like to already set that up in the beginning. So I'm going to use the paint bucket tool again. I'm going to tap on the background, and I will actually change this to something a bit more purple, and I think it needs to be a little bit more desaturated, maybe brighter. Yeah. I think that's quite nice. So what we need to make sure is that this shape is darker. I just go back to the shape and reduce the lightness. But also, what I'm going to do is to reduce the opacity of the image. So the image doesn't have to be so strong and maybe even set it to soft light. Okay? Something like that, maybe reduce or increase the opacity a bit. But then what we can also do is to add another layer, just an empty layer. This can be on top of the adjustment layer, can even be above the image. It doesn't really matter. At this point, maybe I can just put it above. I'm going to use the brush tool and reducing the hardness. You can see we can create a very soft edge for this brush, make the brush size quite big, something like that. Now we can start introducing different colors. All I have to do is to switch to a different color, maybe orange and start painting over now. It's too strong at the moment. We can reduce the opacity with this slider here, going to go down and then paint over it. That's quite nice. Something like that on the top. Then we can make the color darker. Something like this. With that, we can paint around the edges, and that's already starts to create a bit more contrast. We can also introduce maybe darker purple around the edge. Maybe a bit bigger, something like that. 7. Changing colors on characters: So for now, I'm going to just keep it at that. And we can already see how this is working, but I want to also change the colors on the joker characters. So I'm going to do the one on the left first. I will select that layer. It's this one here on the left. So I'm going to create a new layer on top of that, and I'm going to clip it. So I'm going to use the clipping option. And whenever you see the little arrow on the thumbnail. That's when it means it's clipped onto it. So now that it is clipped, we can use instead of the fill color or the paint bucket, we can switch to the gradient tool. And this is quite handy that we have it here because with this, we can create gradients and it's going to create a gradient between the two colors, so your foreground and background color. And you can just paint over it and it will recognize the direction and you can very quickly set it up to whatever you want. I'm going to use a different color. Maybe use something like this. Okay, that's more interesting and then just reduce the opacity. Because I also want these to be a bit more faded, so I don't want them to be so high contrast. So something like this actually works quite well. But then we can also combine effects, so we can create a duplicate of this layer. From the extra options, we can choose duplicate layer. Notice that this is automatically set up as a clipping layer again and I'm going to choose multiply for this and maybe just reduce the opacity a bit. So that is quite good. Now, what we can also do is to add the mask on these gradients. So for example, if I want the face to be a bit more visible, I can tap on the mask icon and then using the brush tool, we can paint over the face, maybe with a bit smaller brush size, something like that. Actually, let's just make the opacity size bigger. Yeah. So notice how we can lift details and show the face a bit more. Because I think that's quite important still, something like that. It doesn't need to stand out that much. Now, once again, I would do the same thing on all of the images. The one in the middle, I would keep almost with its original colors. For that, maybe I would just use an adjustment layer. So I would going to add clipped adjustment, most likely hue saturation. But another cool one is color balance. I'm just going to show you how it works. So with color balance, you can start adjusting these three sliders, and once again, this is very similar to how you would do this in photoshop. So it works exactly the same way. You can turn off the luminosity option or turn it back on. That just helps to keep the same tonal values. And I think this already looks quite interesting. So if we turn off this adjustment layer, that was the original colors, and this is the new colors. So it's almost like adding a bit of tint to the layer. So I would continue adding effects like this. But another thing that I would do at this point already start to organize my layers. So I would have separate groups for everything. This is the main composition. So for this, we can just select all these layers, so I can hold down the little touch shortcut here on the left and just tap on all of the layers here apart from the background layer, and then I'm going to click on the little group icon here on the right, create a layer group, and we can call it jokers Now, another important shape that we have to create is that ring or circle. For that, I'm going to again create a new layer, just a simple empty layer and then use the elliptical marquee selection tool. Holding down the touch shortcut. I can click and drag to create the circle. Roughly around that size will work. Now, after you created the circle, you can fill this in with a color. Again, it doesn't really matter what color, so I'm just going to use the paint bucket tool. Tap on it, and then what we will do is to click on the more options. I really like the fact that they have this. There is the transform selection option here, and then simply pinch somewhere in the center of the selection. With this, you can create the ring, something like that. Tap done on the top right and then hit the erase. So that's how quick and easy it was to create this ring. You can use the selection tool and move this in place. So I think it needs to be somewhere around here. Maybe we can use the free transform to make it slightly smaller. And I think that's going to work. Now, I'm going to already add to this adjustment layer. Add clip adjustment, and I'm going to use hue saturation. Let's just increase the brightness a bit. I'm going to change the color. I use the bright yellow. Yes, something like that. For now, it's going to work. And I'm going to use the mask option. So add a layer mask on this. Using the brush tool, I'm going to set my opacity up and also the hardness all the way up. And then let's just test this brush out yet, that's going to work. Now, when you are using the brush, Obviously, you can just paint over it, and then with this, you can make it look like certain details are in front or behind the circle. But to make it even easier, because we already have these selections saved as masks, all we have to do is to find them, like with the main joker character in the middle. I can select that mask and then go into the extra options and choose load as selection. Once we have that there, we can go back into the mask of our ring. And then if I were to paint over here, you see immediately, it just deletes exactly the details from the arm. And this makes it look like the arm is in front of the ring. Also, we want the head to be in front of it, so we can just very quickly paint over that. And I will keep the other arm behind the ring to create this nice interaction between the ring and the character. But then I'm going to make another selection now. So I would like to make sure that we have the other joker selected now. So I do the same technique. So load a selection, and I think that's it. Yeah, load the selection. Now we go back up here. And also, I want to make sure that we can see him properly. And then I would like to make sure that the ring goes behind this other shape. So I could also move the whole thing behind everything, but then I won't be able to create these interactions. So that's why I prefer to do this on top. Anything that I create as an interlocking shape. I like to keep on top and instead, just use these mosques. So what I'm going to do is similarly to what I've done with the joker characters. I select that shape, the bean shape, and I'm going to load that as a selection, then go back to the mosque and just quickly paint over this thing here. So now, what we need to do is to select the other joker character on the left. So load that as a selection, go up, paint over him. He's also in front. And then I want this also to be behind the central character. So once again, I just load that as a selection and make sure I'm on the right layer, start painting and 8. Adjusting the selections: So we have the interlocking shape created. We started adding some adjustments. Now, notice that there is one issue with the selection in the middle that the shoes are obviously not completely visible. And that is because he was standing on stairs. Now, the quickest way to fix this would be to actually paint in those details. So I'm going to create a new layer quickly, and I'm going to use the brush tool. If you use the touch shortcut, and then drag to the side. It will become the eyedropper tool, so we can very quickly pick a color and then start painting. So I'm just going to go a little bit closer, and make the brush size smaller as well. And in the settings, I will make sure we have the pressure set, maybe also a bit of smoothing. So when I'm painting, it looks like this. One thing for drawing that I'm really missing is the ability to rotate the screen, rotate the view. That's also something that they plan to add later. I'm really looking forward to that. Just going to put this actually on top and that way we can paint over it and blend it a little bit better. Okay. So this is just going to be a very rough drawing just so I can show you how I imagine having this quick fix. You already see that that shoe looks quite good already. And then the other one, we have to do a little bit more work here. So I'm just using the brush. Then again, touch shortcut, pick this color, and then paint, something like that. Now, you could also use the clone SM tool for this, but I just feel like I'm faster working with the brush tool. I try to imagine how this would look like, probably a bit further out here. And then that needs to come out as well a bit more. Okay. So I'm not going to waste too much time on this. Now, I'm going to be just wrapping it up around somewhere around there. Also, if you hod down the touch shortcut while you are painting, that temporarily turns into the eraser which is really handy. So you can paint and then erase with the same tool. Let's see without and with this layer. I think it looks quite good. I want to make Joker look like he's floating in space, almost like he jumped up. I'm going to create another layer at the bottom, and I will use the lasso tool. Just draw very quickly, something like that. Fill that in actually on a separate layer. I forgot to do that. On a separate layer, fill that in with a color, then deselect, and then we are going to use this additional options here. At the moment, we only have two filters here, Gsmbler and invert. Invert will just invert the color. But that's not what I wanted. I wanted Gs and blur. So I'm going to create this very soft shadow because he's up in the air, so it shouldn't be too harsh, the edges of this shadow. And I'm going to yeah around there is fine. I can adjust the blur, obviously. I'm just going to keep it around 70 it done, and I use the free transform tool and just squeeze this together a bit, make it a bit more flat, drag it down, and then reduce the opacity in the blending options. So there you go. That looks quite good already. Maybe one additional thing is to set this to multiply. I think it will blend with the background a bit better. It doesn't make much difference, but it still, I think looks slightly better. Now, of course, I can always tweak this further. But for now, I think this will work. Now, of course, we can always check how the whole thing looks on different backgrounds, so we can create a new duplicate of the background layer, and then we can fill it in maybe with a darker color. It looks quite nice with dark as well. But I'd like to have several backgrounds, and then I'd like to experiment with that while I'm working on the design. Now, going back to the ring, there's an additional thing I wanted to do there as well. I'm going to select the ring, create a new layer, and this is already clipped onto the ring. So I'm going to use the brush tool. And with the brush tool, we will pick the original color. But then I'm going to change that color and make it darker, make the edges soft, make the size slightly bigger, and the opacity or I'm going to keep low. Okay. I really like this little selector here on the left with my left hand. I can very quickly adjust it. And of course, if you are left handed and you draw with the left hand, then you can move that little selector to the right side, so you can customize the location of it. But what I'm going to do here is to simply paint over this Having the layer on top of the adjustment will work better. Let's make the size of the brush bigger. What I'm doing here, you will see, I'm just adding a little bit of shading with multiply adjustment layer. I think it works better. I can create a bit of shading around these parts, make it look like there is some car shadow around the ring. Very quickly. I'm not going to waste too much time here as well. There there. Okay. So without and with just a subtle little addition there. Now, of course, if you feel like it's a bit too much, you can always reduce the opacity because once again, this is completely non destructive. It's on a separate layer. One thing that I find not that good at this point is that we have here a very strange thing. I'm going to show you, I would call this a tangent. So this point here. The problem with this is that we have a ring coming and then we have this shape coming, and then we have the jokers trouser also in the same place. So this point here is an intersection, which is not good. It would be better to have this ring slightly visible there, something like that, or maybe have the ring further going up, so it's not feeling uncomfortable. That it feels like almost like a mistake now. So it's good to avoid these, and even this here is a little bit too small that negative space. So I would make sure if I have a bit more time, I would refine these negative spaces as well to make sure that they read well. Like here, we have a nice negative space there as well. These are working really well. So I don't feel like there's a clashing between them. 9. Adding Type: All in all, I think with the image and the composition we are already doing quite well, and I'm going to just very quickly show you how I would add the typography. For that, we can use the type tool, and with the type tool, we just click somewhere on the image, and then I'm going to just type in a capital S. Actually, we need to have the text selected, make it white, and then let's increase the phone size to something like that. Okay. So we have the first letter there. I actually had another shape here, which I'm going to very quickly create in the background, new layer, less so tool. I'm just repeating the same things that I've done before, so I'm going a little bit faster. I'm going to create this shape. Okay. And then we can feel this on this new layer with a color, maybe using an orange. The typography, if we go back to our text layer now has a place where we can put it. So I'm just going to place it somewhere around here. I'll just make it slightly bigger, and for this, we can also use the free transform tool. Just have to make sure you drag one of the corner points, otherwise it's going to stretch it. And by the way, whenever I'm going back and forth, so I'm redoing undoing things, I just tap with two fingers so that's undo and with three fingers, you can go ahead, so that's redo. Now, I'm going to duplicate this layer, and there's also another handy shortcut for that. With the touch shortcut, you just press and then drag to the side of it and then drag the shape or the layer that you have selected. So that's a quick way of duplicating something. Let me show this again. So if you just hold down the center of the touch shortcut, with that, you can constrain the movement. So that's like holding down the shift key. But if you then drag to the site, that becomes the alter option key, which is to duplicate. So what I'm going to do now is to double click on the second one, and this is going to be a, then double click on the thumbnail of the third one, that's going to be. Then I'm just going to very quickly duplicate this two more time as one and another one, and then this one is going to be L and the other one is going to be the top one is going to be. The reason why I created them all in separate layers because I wanted to create this more dynamic composition on the text. So we can place the L somewhere around here, the somewhere around there, and then the M can go somewhere around here. Now, what I want to make sure is that it will definitely read in the right order, so I don't want it to be too complicated to read. Now, I would like to just create a little bit of interaction on the text, so they are not just sitting on top of these images. So first of all, maybe the M. I can move further down in the composition. I think it would work quite nicely behind that shape. So here you can see that's quite nice. Make sure it's still legible, so don't hide it too much. I'm just going to keep one of the details behind that shape. And then what I'm going to do with the letter I is to add a mask on it. I'll lay a mask. Use the brush tool set the brush up, make sure it's hard edge brush, smaller size, and then all I'm going to do here is to paint over it and make it look like it's hidden under the jacket I gets smaller as well. Yeah. Something like that. Then an additional layer on top of this clip it, and then just simply on this separate layer, we can paint over the top. Okay. And keep adding on it a bit just to create that depth effect. Something like that. You can see it feels like the is under the checket. With little bits of tricks like these, you can create a more unique, interesting composition. All I would do after this is to refine things and obviously add the additional put on a happy face on the bottom right. But essentially, these were the techniques I wanted to show you and you can see that we could create a composition on photoshop for iPad quite quickly and efficiently. 10. Conclusion: Well done for finishing this course. I hope you had just as much fun going through it as I had recording it. And of course, don't forget about the class project. Because remember, practice makes perfect. I can't wait to see your work, so make sure to submit it. And in case you like this course, and you would like to learn more from me, then there's plenty of other courses that you can find here. Go and check them out now. I can't wait to meet you in the next one.