Film poster art for musical indie rom-com God Help the Girl from Metrodome distribution released in 2014. The film stars Olly Alexander (lead singer of the British band Years and Years) and directed by Stuart Murdoch.
For the painting process I decided to stick to a digital workflow using Photoshop and Illustrator CS3 with my trusty Wacom Graphire 4 tablet. My creative direction was simple, incorporating an opaque flat colour approach with little or no airbrushing. I sampled colours from four different palettes with high saturation values and bright hues. James is a musician and rarely seen without his guitar, so I decided to portray him in this light. The guitar’s structure comprises of twenty-two layers alone including textures and reflective brushwork. I sampled seventy-six colours in total and only used a handful to create the look and feel of his guitar. In keeping with the band's bold two-tone album cover art, I went for a minimal but more exciting full colour painting approach which should appease fans of Belle & Sebastian with a single colour background to accompany each of the actor illustrations. The idea was if the illustration has a high saturation value, then the background colour would be low saturation and vice versa. I later came across the Albers approach to colour studies which lead to the idea of finding the largest area of a hue from the actor illustration and producing a distinct colour within the same family for the background. I also attempted to combine these ideas with complimentary colours and split complimentary colours to cohesively bring them all together.
For more info about 'God Help the Girl' visit - https://www.facebook.com/GodHelpTheGirlFilm
Line-art
Olly Alexander as James
Photographic reference
