In the last lesson,
we did some sketching for the poster.
In this lesson,
we'll develop an image that demonstrates simultaneous contrast for the
exhibition poster.
Our goal in this lesson is to create an image for the first of our two exhibition posters.
And this one is going to be using an image from the Albers experiments,
where we try to make three colors look like two using complementary colors.
And this is one of the images I made earlier.
Here's another one.
These are both examples of making three colors look like two using
complementary colors, red and green in this case,
orange and blue here.
Now, I'm also going to take
a look at these sketches that I made earlier and see how these images might be used in the actual
design of the poster.
So, here's the first page of sketches.
And remember,
there's no limit to how many sketches you can make and how many sketches you can look at in order to get
ideas for your final poster design.
And initially, I really liked this poster in the upper right and
the poster down here that's angled in the lower left.
And I still really like those ideas.
And I might try to at least use those as a basis for one of my designs.
I also have pictures of the other sketches that are based on the other color theory experiment,
the illusion of transparency.
But right now, we're focusing on this one idea.
Eventually, we're going to be using both of the ideas,
making three colors look like two and illusion of transparency and space illusion in the poster animation.
And these images will be part of the animation.
They'll cycle through, they'll loop in a certain way.
And that actual poster, that animated poster,
will basically be a combination of the two versions of the poster we make for print.
Hopefully, that makes sense at this point,
but it's also jumping ahead a little bit too much.
But that one thing we want to make sure is that when we get to that final digital version of the poster,
the animated version,
that the background color is the same and the typography is more or less the same.
But in these posters that we designed for print,
that can change a little bit as long as the same image can be used in the digital animation version.
The images can be different colors as long as they both work on the same colored background and can be used with the same basic typographic treatment.
So I still like these two ideas,
the upper right and the lower left.
Both of them have good possibilities.
And just in terms of colors,
right now, they probably relate best to the red and the green,
which is kind of interesting.
The orange and blue is nice too,
but I'm really kind of interested in the idea of the red and
green and exploiting that as a possibility.
So I think I'm going to end up using this one.
And in terms of the sketches,
it's hard to tell.
I think I kind of like the angle sketch just because it's very dramatic.
Yeah I think we're going to go with this sketch down here.
This one over here is really interesting,
but I think it's going to be very limiting
in terms of how I end up using a distorted image in the final digital animation poster.
So I think that this simple angled poster is very Bauhaus-inspired,
constructivist-inspired
poster here in the lower left is probably the one I'm going to use.
Has a gray background already and I think that's a good idea just to unify both posters
to have a gray background.
So I'll start with that.
And the typography is existing in the lower part of the poster.
Again, that's something that can be a little bit fluid at this point.
I'm mostly concerned with the image.
So let's go back to this red and green image.
And so now I've really chosen that and I want to think about how this is going to be used in the poster itself.
And by the way,
you might remember that I created this image in Illustrator initially.
Here I've opened it up in Photoshop and I've done that specifically so that whatever imagery
I make here, I can put on layers and I can then use those layers to create my final digital animation.
I could do that in Illustrator too.
It's possible, but I'd eventually have to import everything into Photoshop.
So better just to rebuild this image.
However, I'm going to size it.
However, I'm going to position it,
rebuild it in that way specifically for the poster.
So the first thing I'm going to do is create just basically the document for the poster itself.
So I'm going to open up a new Photoshop file and the size of the poster is going to be A1.
So if we quickly look up an A1 size paper dimensions,
that's 594 by 841 millimeters or
23.4 by 33.1 inches.
We can work either way.
Whatever measurement you are most accustomed to,
we can work in that.
I'm going to work in millimeters.
So 594 by 841.
And I'm going to set the resolution to 300,
which is kind of the industry standard.
And I'm going to initially work in CMYK colors
with a white background.
This is going to be best simply because these posters are meant for printing
and will later be used in a digital way.
But I think right now we'll work in CMYK and then we'll switch to RGB later
and we'll see what happens to the colors.
We might have to make some adjustments,
but I don't think so. OK,
so there's the poster dimensions,
the proportions,
A1 proportions, that very beautiful A1 rectangle.
Of course, the A1 size is something that's an international size.
It can be printed universally.
It'll fit on a variety of different kinds of papers,
including papers that are available in most digital printing services around the world.
And with all of the A series sizes,
it can be sized down incrementally to different sizes,
smaller sizes and bigger sizes,
depending on how you want to end up printing this.
So A1.
Now I'm going to give this a name,
just make sure that that's done as quickly as possible.
I'll simply put this into this folder at this moment, the downloads folder. So I'm going to call this Albers exhibition poster.
And I'm going to say V1 just in case I end up doing another version of this.
There it is.
OK,
so that's my background and I'm just going to leave this white for the moment.
And I'm going to go back to my red and green position and import the image.
And I'm going to import the image. And I'm going to import the image. And I'm going to go back to my red and green position and import that in.
And copy,
duplicate this layer into the Albers exhibition poster file.
I'm going to close down some of these others as well,
because I don't need to see them anymore.
Five looks like six.
Oh, that is pretty amazing to look at this now on screen again.
Pretty incredible.
I'm always just totally blown away by these color illusions.
This is making three colors look like four.
So it's basically just this that I need.
And I'm just going to bring it into the frame.
And look back at my sketch.
I'm going to import that sketch right into this.
So I have it here.
So I'm going to come over here and make a selection.
Just this one.
And I'm going to copy this.
And when I paste this into Photoshop.
There it is as a sketch.
It's on its own layer.
Very cool.
And I can enlarge that.
Very rough at this moment,
but that's not bad.
So now I know basically how big I'm going to need my image.
So I can drag this image into place.
And this is just basically going to be used as a template, as a placeholder.
I'll rotate that over.
And place it here and scale it up.
My scale tool.
And now I'm just pressing my arrow key to enlarge it.
I like using the arrow keys.
Move it into place.
Again, I'm just approximating right now.
I do notice how this tip up here on
the sketch bleeds right off the top of the poster,
which is kind of nice.
So let me just do that.
Continue moving this up.
It's 191% right now.
Percentage doesn't really matter.
I'm going to rebuild it.
One of the things I often look for in my poster designs are these tensions.
These visual tensions that develop along the edges.
So this idea of having a point that intersects an edge.
It's a really interesting concept to work with.
And what it does is
that it closes off whatever negative space is to the,
well, to adjacent to that edge, that point,
that tension.
So now this triangle up here is one of the main negative shapes in the poster.
No matter what I do to the poster,
that's going to be there.
Same thing with this negative shape.
It's off to the right corner.
And even the big negative shape at the bottom.
So we have three large triangular shapes.
If you think about that.
So we could say that the negative shapes are all now unified.
Now the other thing I'm going to do on this is just take off this gradient because I no longer need that.
I'm just going to select this and delete it.
The typography is going to sit somewhere down here.
And we're going to come back to the typography later.
So I'm just thinking about the image right now.
So that's good.
So now I want to recreate this image and I'm going to do it in a way where each
of the elements in this image is basically it's four rectangles that are all angled.
Each of these are on its own layer.
And that's important to do that so that when we come to our animation later
on at final product,
the final stage of this design,
that each of the elements will be on
its own layer so that I can make frames from these various layers and use them to populate
the animation as basically frames for the animation.
So think about that.
Each one of these shapes, the red shape,
the green shape, and then the two inside shapes,
which are actually the same color,
they just look so different here.
Those basically will all be
on their own, their separate layer.
The other thing I'm going to do right now is just put
in a background color,
a gray color.
See what happens and how that affects the color of the piece.
It's a little bit strong.
A little bit too dark.
I go a little bit lighter with this.
That's better.
More contrast.
Okay.
Let's go with that for now.
They're looking nice.
I might actually want to increase the contrast of this image too,
but let's worry about that later.
So the first thing I want to do now is recreate this image and it's a nice angle.
I have the angle, but in order to create this image,
I want to go back to horizontal and vertical.
It's going to be the easiest way to do this.
So I'm going to recreate this,
duplicate this layer,
turn off the bottom layer and take this now and rotate this back to be perfectly horizontal.
And I can bring a die down to make sure that it's as horizontal as possible.
You may have noticed that I'm not very good with this particular mouse I'm using here.
I'm used to such an
old school single click mouse and this one has multiple functions on it.
So I'm tending to get a lot of menus that are not really very useful.
Okay.
So here we have it.
It's now squared up nicely and it doesn't really matter that it's centered,
but I'm going to center it anyway.
Optically center it.
Move it up a little bit.
That's always right on that line.
And I'm going to bring more guys in just to lock it in place.
Again, I want to have the same exact image.
So when I rotated back into the placement that I already created,
I think it'll be great.
So great that Photoshop has these guides that seem to lock in place sometimes.
I think that center guide locked in place because it's right in the middle,
which pure luck on my part.
Let's zoom up on this.
This is something that I can get more involved with the details of this later.
Since I spent a lot of time in Illustrator making sure that these things were in the right places,
I want them to be that way now too.
So I have my guides and I can now proceed to create these
images using more than one frame.
So the first thing I'll do is sample the color on the top layer, the red,
and I'll make that rectangle.
So that's now my foreground color.
Go up here,
make my image selection,
make sure the feather is set to zero.
Zoom up on this,
square it up in the page.
I'm going to fill that with the red color.
So if I turn off my background,
you'll see that basically all I have now is that.
Now I'm going to take this same image and just duplicate it to the other side.
So I have the same size on each side.
I can move this straight across.
Like that.
And let's turn these off for a minute.
Go down here and make the background color the green.
Go back up to this layer and now fill that with green.
So there's that.
And just take a look without my guides.
There we go.
So now I have,
as you can see in the layer palette,
I have layers, individual layers,
for each one of these backgrounds.
Very simple.
Now I'm going to add the inside colors here and here.
Again, on their own layers.
So I'll make another layer on top of this.
I'm going to move,
yeah, I'll leave it there for now.
Make a selection,
this inside.
Now if I go back down here,
I can actually sample this color.
And fill that rectangle with that color there.
And do the same thing where I duplicate the layer.
And move it to the other side.
All right, turn that off, turn off my guides.
So now I have each of these elements on its own layer.
Turn that off.
Let's do this again.
So we have the red background,
we have the green background,
we have the inset on the red side,
we have the inset on the green side.
All on their own layers.
And notice that those colors are still holding.
This color over here,
again, if you stare at the center of this composition,
it starts to look green.
This color starts to look red.
The color illusion is still pretty effective.
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