Kleos Grappling Tournament poster

I designed a Medusa themed poster for a UK tournament called Kleos Grappling. Here is a breakdown of how I put it together:

1. Kleos is a Greek word so that's really the only connection as to why I chose to feature the Medusa. Plus of course the medusa is a darn cool mythological character to draw. The above is a first draft rough to show the tournament organisers what I had in mind. Once approved, I moved onto planning the design proper.

2. For the above image, I wanted to make sure the lettering had a convincing 3-D boulder rock effect. To do this, I typed the words into Illustrator and then used the 'extrude' function to give it the 3D effect. I played around with the depth and perspective variables to get kind of what I wanted. Once I was happy with the letters, I placed them into Manga Studio Pro and started drawing a rough Medusa face and snake hair.

3. Using Manga Studio Pro, I began inking the face and snakes in more detail, taking care not to overlap the lines too much and also to ensure that each snake was drawn individually. It would have been easier to just mirror one half over to the other, but I felt that drawing the whole piece and avoiding copy/pasting/mirroring would result in a more organic and authentically hand drawn feel to the piece.

4. In the above image, you can see how I used the Illustrator created 3D text as a base for me to trace the rocky-lines over.

5. Still using Manga Studio Pro, I airbrushed some grey tones around the face, some gothic influenced makeup under the eyes and just to add some general depth.

6. In the final poster above, I added a red layer over the top, dropped back some of the tonal shading, then added logos and text.



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