War of the Worlds Poster

I tried various different scenes for my War of the Worlds project, but eventually decided I wanted to do something stylised.

 I decided I wanted to produce a movie poster, and so I took a look at various 1950s horror film posters. I wanted to try to capture the style they used, with bold colours and simple layouts.

 

I had a vague idea of how I wanted the poster to look, so I drew up a series of thumbnails to try different compositions. I eventually settled on the one with two tripods, one of them looming over to give a sense of scale and one further away, that was seen fully, as most of the poster I looked at clearly showed whatever the monster was.

I then had to pick a colour scheme. The poster I was using for reference had a large variety of different colours, but usually they were bold, with at least one primary hue and the different colours clearly separated. I narrowed it down to blue/turquoise/yellow/pink as I really liked how the blue metal tripods looked against the turquoise, and tried different compositions of those colours, taking into account how the title text would look against the background.

 

The biggest difficulty was trying to make sure the legs of the tripods were distinct from one another, since they crossed over and were oddly shaped. I tried to make the places where they crossed were separated so it was clear which parts were continuous.

All in all I’m quite pleased with how it came together.