CreativeJUUS

Creative Mondays 7 – Solarize

// January 9th, 2012 // No Comments » // Creative Mondays, Graphic Design, Inspiration, Photoshop

“What is Creative Mondays?

Monday’s are always a drag. The start of a new week, you have to go back to that routine of going to bed early/get up early. If (like me) you have to commute then you prepare for that long journey into work and that long journey back for the first time after a nice two day break.

So to kick off those lousy Mondays, I’m going to get my creative mind flowing in a positive way. Creative Mondays. A chance for me to show off something unfinished or finished that I’ve been working on throughout the previous week.”

This week’s Creative Mondays piece comes in the form of a blu-ray cover design I entered for a competition on PhotoshopCafe. The competition requires that you must “Design a ficticious Blu-ray cover that can include an original illustration, photograph, photomanip, collage, whatever you like, as long as Photoshop is used somewhere in the creation of the piece.”

Being the massive fan of outer space and galaxies that I am I chose the Photoshop filter ‘Solarize’ as my element to parody. The sun is rapidly becoming a supernova and the Earth will soon meet it’s fate… the remaining population must find a way to get off the planet to safety! Something along those lines.

It’s a great competition and what’s more I’ve joined a forum of enthusiastic artists that like to discuss and share their work. The competition is free to enter and finishes on the 31st of January! You can check it out here.

Source Code Poster

// June 2nd, 2011 // No Comments » // Graphic Design, Illustration, Inspiration, Photoshop, Posters

Saw Duncan Jones’ Source Code a while back and quite enjoyed the film (big fan of his first film Moon). He brings an intelligence to popular science fiction stories without having to go over the top and while there’s plenty of special effects in his films they’re not always dictating what happens next.

I was inspired by the various posters created by others and wanted to attempt a version myself. A lot of the other versions were very detailed so I wanted to create a minimalistic ‘teaser style’ poster for the film that would draw the viewer in but not give any information away. Immediately the visual of the train tracks stuck in my mind with both being parallel to each other and one abruptly ending.

I really enjoyed creating this style of work and it helps clear the clutter in my brain with a simplistic design once in a while!

A Star Had to Die Poster

// April 3rd, 2011 // 2 Comments » // Graphic Design, Illustration, Inspiration, Photoshop

Here is a poster design I had been thinking about doing for a while. A few weeks ago, an episode of the very popular ‘Wonders of the Universe‘ was on BBC2. The episode was called ‘Stardust’ and in it Professor Brian Cox discussed what we are made of and more specifically where we came from.

Amazingly, the answer comes from the death of a sun.

As Professor Cox says,
Our ingredients were cooked in the hearts of ancient suns, thrown out into the universe in their deaths and eventually brought back together to form our solar system by the relentless pull of gravity.

The elements we hold most precious were forged at the moment of these magnificent stellar deaths.

Each week the television show usually pops up on Twitter’s trending list and there are always some great comments that people leave after either being inspired or intrigued by what they’ve just seen. The one you see on the poster design (from @robleen on Twitter) inspired me the most and it beautifully captured the message of the show.

The version that you see here is pretty much as I envisioned it. I’ve been meaning to get back into creating for myself recently so I wanted to start on an idea that was fresh in my mind. I have to add that the work of James White (Signalnoise) was a huge inspiration to me on this poster. I also have to thank Robyn Clark for the awesome Twitter quote!

I’ll be trying to get a proof printed off soon in hopes that I can get a printed run going and sell a few of these to anyone who’s interested!