As of late I have been really inspired by Shepard Fairey’s artwork. You know… the guy that did that really cool vector Obama “change” poster. Anyway, so for my submission for the Snail / Ship weekly art challuunge I decided that I would take a stab at that style.
Here is my process in a nut-shell: So I started off by taking a photo of my buddy Andrew in a buttoned up shirt and our buddy Danny’s baseball hat. I then did some Photoshop work giving him the USPS logos on his hat and shirt. I then added some stripes to the shirt, and then duplicated the photo 4 times and poster-ized the images. I proceeded to adjust the “threshold of each to descend from light to darker images. I then brought those images into Illustrator and drew the four different images in vector format (the tan, light & dark blues and red). I added the word SNAIL, implying the snail mail aspect of the USPS and then added the colors and line shading. With a few more adjustments on the shading and lighting I was finally done. This took way more time that I had first anticipated, but I think it turned out better than I expected. Here is the result. Click the pic to enlarge. Hope you dig.