Poster Development - 'The Butterfly'

The last of my sketches to be developed and constructed was the idea of the butterfly. I started searching for images of butterflies to use that I would be able to play with and experiment with. I eventually settled on a beautiful, vibrant blue butterfly called the Morpho Didius. The butterfly was so eye-catching that the ideas were easily simple and effective. Here is some of the work I came up with:

I tried to initially replicate my sketch ideas by putting the butterfly over the subject but I didn't feel like it had the same effect. Although the colours went well with the black and white, there was definitely a lack of professionalism within the work. It didn't look arty, but instead, looked as if it was trying to hard. I immediately reverted to trying different ideas with the butterfly. 

Through my research into posters, one of the styles that really appeared to me was the use of iconography. Some posters, examples of textual poaching and fan-art, would use one singular image from the film that would be recognised as part of that film. For an example, I came across one poster for Forrest Gump (1994) that simple had the title and a picture of a shrimp. I loved the simplicity of these minimalist art posters. I felt that one simple picture, if it was artistic enough, or attractive enough, or relatable enough, it would work.

 I found my idea for the butterfly posters very similar to the use of the feather in Forrest Gump. The feather is a constant feature in the film, random, ambitious, but definitely symbolic, with its reason left for the audience to discover and interpret. I plan on using the butterfly in the same sense in 'Those Who Wander'.

I decided to use the image of the butterfly alone. I began by using the patch tool in photoshop to create the style of a stained black page of paper as the background, symbolic of a plain page of a book, left to be written, tying in with themes of the film previously mentioned. I further duplicated the layer of the butterfly image and altered the tone and created a drop shadow and enlarged it. I experimented with altering the angles and sizes of the butterfly. I really like these first two drafts as I think they are playfully ambitious, iconographic and also artistic. The only fault is that the title and text is slightly difficult to read in black.

I continued to experiment with the angles and styles of the butterfly image and eventually tried to combine both its image with that of the script. The two looked good together in terms of colour, but I felt that overall, the pictures together made the butterfly look too superimposed, defeating the object of it being natural and stylish.