First off, a little background on the project. I started this project wanting to combine two opposite movies into one movie poster. After some combining, I finally settled on using Forrest Gump and The Day the Earth Stood Still. I also wanted to limit the color palette to no more than two colors. I set it up to where Forrest Gump is Gort, and Lieutenant Dan played Klaatu. The scene is right after the two have stepped out of their ship to greet the people of earth.

Up to this point, all illustrations I have done were painstakingly created with a mouse. I had recently bought a new Huion 610pro tablet and decided that this would be my first piece that I used a tablet exclusively (other than some finishing touches and effects). Let me tell you, this was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. Not only was I teaching myself how to use a tablet, but drawing has never been a strong suit for me. Nonetheless, I set out on this difficult journey and created the posters shown.

I started off by individually sketching each element of the poster. I would sketch the Capital Building for example, and then transfer it over to the poster. Once I had all of the pieces in place and had a basic sketch of what I wanted, I expanded all of the lines and used the Live Paint function in Adobe Illustrator to fill in the shapes with color.

Afterwards, I expanded the image again and worked on the shading and highlights. I used the Knife Tool to cut the shapes I had created with Live Paint into sections with highlights or shadows. I then just used a tint or shade of the same color in order to create the shading.

I ended the piece with the lighting effects (white radial gradient from 100% to 0% opacity) and a nice Vignette. I did the The Day the Gump Stood Still title in Adobe Photoshop using a text effect I had found.

All in all, I struggled with this piece at first, but eventually got really into it and the idea of using a tablet to draw. I plan on doing a lot more illustrations in the near future!

What are your thoughts on the pieces? Have any constructive criticism? I would greatly appreciate any thoughts in the comments below!