

Here’s a poster for my favourite movie, John Carpenter’s masterpiece: THE THING.
I started this design hot on the heels of completing the BLADE RUNNER poster. I’m continuously learning new tricks and processes as I go, so I wanted to really dial in on the style I explored in BLADE RUNNER and simplify it. Really concentrate on the shapes that make up the highlights and shadows. The goal was to reduce the overall number of points, but really make them count. Smooth curves.
The over-arcing concept was to depict the alien taking human form, so I knew early on I needed some kind of weird abstract alien gore in there which proved to be the toughest challenge. I sought reference in the film, but I didn’t want hands, or tentacles, or a spider-head. I wanted a mess of scary “whatever”. I had to draw it all from the ground up (pencil and paper, kids) and on the third attempt it finally fell into place. From there it hit the scanner to be re-built in Illustrator.
Like my BLADE RUNNER poster, this is 100% vector. Not a hint of Photoshop in there. I see this and the BLADE RUNNER poster as kind of companion pieces since I did them both back to back with similar methodologies.
But again, it was all about atmosphere. I wanted this poster to feel like the movie. That was priority 1.
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