I love movie poster designs, so if I ever get the slightest chance to play around with one — I jump on the opportunity! So is the case with my wife’s close friend Heather, which is having a bachelorette party — The Hangover style! My wife and I tossed some ideas around with the Maid of Honor and we came up with some really great ideas. Now being that Heather will be reading this post, I can’t leak too much info, but I will say that there might be an appearance by Mike Tyson’s Tiger! Here’s a quick rundown of some techniques I used to make this poster, let’s get started.

The Inspiration

Constructing the Sign

I know there are lots of ways to make a simple dot background but here’s what I feel is the best way. I used to make a circle and option-drag to duplicate, then command-D to keep repeating them until I got the amount of circles I wanted, then I would group those and start doing the same thing to get the vertical ones…not good, or efficient.

Start with one dot selected and then go to Effect > Distort & Transform > Transform, that will bring up this dialog box. Play with the  move settings to get the distance you like between the dots and the amount of copies, hit OK.

Click that same dot again and go Effect > Distort & Transform > Transform one more time to offset the vertical dots. A dialog box will pop-up asking you if you want to clear the previous effect or keep it and add another — add another. Play with the move settings to get the vertical distance you like between the dots, hit OK. There you go, much easier and you can go back and change the settings if you want now, and all from one dot.

Here you see my path layout before I placed them all into Photoshop. The bulbs in Heather’s name were placed individually, there just wasn’t any way around it, and it gave another imperfect feel to the design.

Once I had the composite sign made I then placed each separate object into Photoshop as a smart object so I could apply different styles to each element and that also allowed me to jump back into Illustrator and make any adjustments as well.

Blending Modes Are Your Friend

For the burned background of the sign I filled a new layer with 50% gray clipped into the smart object Illustrator layer and just brushed away with black. I found that the Hard Light mode worked best, there’s no secret formula, but with 50% gray it needs to be Overlay, Soft Light or Hard Light. After that it’s seriously just a matter of playing. I’m constantly blurring, adding noise, selectively blurring areas and really just trying to make it look as organic and random as possible.

I think one of the big mistakes most people make is that they rely too much on just straight layer styles. If you look closely at things, movie posters in specific, they always have those small tweaks and details that just give them that extra little touch, which also makes them fairly difficult to duplicate.

I’m loving the new option in the tool bar for letting the Wacom override the actual brush panel in Photoshop CS5, I’m pretty sure you could do this in CS4, but it was just buried inside the panel—hey, I’m lazy!

For the inside fill bulbs & neon tubes I just cycled through the blend modes inside the Layer Styles box and picked one that looked best to me. It really is just a matter of taking the time to go through them and see what looks cool, no really. I think you would be surprised with the results you can get by just doing this all the time.

Neon Sign Composite:

Refining Heather

As you can see, this wouldn’t be the easiest to pull off the background, but far from the hardest. The new Smart Radius feature in Photoshop CS5 has made this process much less painful.
Photo Courtesy of: Dott Photography

It did a pretty fair job and gave me a much better starting point than messing about with channels for minutes on end. After I commited to the selection and used the new output “New Layer with Layer Mask” option I used the ol’ Dave Cross trick of taking a soft brush set to overlay mode painting with white or black in the layer mask to further fine-tune the selection.

To get the back glow effect I made a loose circular shape with the Lasso Tool, Guassian blurred it, then radial blurred it out from around the head, then using the new mask panel ( introduced in CS4) I punched a hole out of the center and feathered the mask to simulate the back glow spilling around her in the front.

Final Image:

And there you have, hope you gained something from this if not a quick laugh! Now, I didn’t go into every detail of making this, but if you have any questions feel free to contact me.