I have been starting and stopping and restarting this project for years now. I wanted to make Buster Crabbe front and centre with Ming, the spaceship and the cloud city as elements but I wasn't sure if I could get the likeness strong enough, especially when I decide I wanted to make it in Affinity Designer all in vector drawing. I more recently have been wanting to make portraits with AD and thought if I want to get to a place to do that this Flash Gordon project might be a good training ground and test. Afterall, all the people I'm drawing are dead and can't be mad if I do badly.
This will work for the poster, though I am not sure I got the likeness as close as I would like. I used layers of shapes with blurred edges overlapping to get the soft blending for a more natural look over the overly clean 3D model look vectors can have. I think I really got the overly dyed blonde hair right. There are 100s and 100s of lines to make the hair and I added shapes for shading underneath to keep it from looking too flat. His shirt was inspired by but not copied from any one shirt or another from the series, there were a few to look towards for ideas and I think I get something with a little of all of them in it.
I can still make adjustments as I go and likely will. I wasn't going to do Ming but now I think I will start him and see how it goes.
The final poster will have an art deco feel and I don't think I'll do a logo or anything like that. I made one from the original movie version but it's pretty ugly and not having it will give me more options when making the composition.
2 comments:
This is a tough one; I like the line version better. I think the blending is too soft and the precision of the likeness is lost a bit, especially around the mouth. The eyes are still sharp. Same is true for Ming above. The line-only version I just think is stronger. But again, that's just me.
You aren't wrong. After a few days away from it I redrew much of the face. I have a tendency to "wash out" some faces, especially the lips. I am always wary of adding shading and detail to lips even in my pen and ink. I am posting the probably finished poster later today and Flash looks very different and in the context of the poster it all works better... I think.
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