Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Hitching the wagon

In august I'm getting married which is fun. But what's even better is I get to design my invitations! (only kidding, honey).
Since my lovely girlfriend soon to be wife is from South Korea and I'm still buzzing from the trip we took there in May I decided to go with Korean feel.

In South Korea almost everything looks beautiful and grubby at the same time. And in some way the beauty and the grubbyness seem to compliment each other wonderfully. So not phased by the fact that in Korea this came about over a few hundred years, I set upon trying to achieve the same feel in the invitation.

Since the Korean manga industrie is renowned for ripping off the Japanese manga classics, I decided to do the same... And since I bought a dvd boxset of AstroBoy in Soul the choice of which classic to rip off was easely made.

So First I started to sketch out the characters...


Then came the type. Based on some AstroBoy artwork from the 70' (i think) I did the main lettering of the word "Trouwen" in Illustrator. No handdrawn sketches because it's such a straight/blocky style.
For all the remaing typography I used Bullet Smallcaps from the House Industries font library, and quite heavily tweeked it using the 'skew' and 'free transform' features in Illustrator (yeah I went no holds barred on this one).


The next step was to dump it all in photoshop, color it all, add some cutesy robot characters, Korean type and some of that all important grubbyness. The latter mainly consisted of the 'pixelate > color halftone' effect and switching all the layer blending modes to 'multiply' and putting it all to the background of a scanned in piece of cardboard. Et voilá, c'est la belle grub.

No comments: