FossilAlice

I was commissioned to create a poster for the first Ulverston Pride Festival. The criteria I agreed on with Community Solutions was to represent Ulverston in both its historical and modern contexts while, of course, being pride-focused.

Above is the initial sketch I presented for the scene. The idea behind it was to show Market Street in a crowd of people with rainbow-themed outfits, parading down the streets. Market stalls selling things etc. However, first I needed to do research to correctly represent the street in question.

In the last week of January, I went to Ulverston and took two photo scans of the street and composited those scans. They were only very rough scans, but that’s all I needed for this project. These scans allowed me to accurately represent the layout of the street and measurements of how far apart buildings are. I also collected some reference photos while I was in town to capture the contemporary aesthetics of the town. I also based the style of the poster on the holiday posters by Frank Sherwin. His work inspired the painterly style of the poster, including the border and font used.

Once I had gathered my reference material I started the process of blocking out the scene. The blockout consisted almost exclusively of cubes – the simplest primitive that can be used to represent a building, totaling 21 individual cubes. Slightly under 21 individual buildings that need to be represented. I also blocked some key assets: Tables, plant pots, memorial crosses, and bollards. I also had a human scale reference to keep the scene consistent.

Once the primary blockout was in place I started working on the scene assets. Complex scenes such as this are composed of a lot of instances of pre-made assets. Some assets, such as the war memorial below, are unique and only used once in the scene. Other assets are reused. Plant pots, flowers, windows, etc. don’t need to be unique as making each window would be more time-consuming than it’s worth. I made a video of the process of making the flowerpots which can be found here: pt.1 pt.2.

In total I created 104 individual assets, a couple of which were dynamic, changing to fit the length of a roof for example and two assets required me to develop new tools just to use them efficiently. One of the most notable tools I created was designed for placing windows into buildings much faster than individually modeling spaces for each window. It essentially functioned as a more advanced boolean tool that simultaneously placed assets.

Most of the textures in this scene are hand painted, supplimented with some additional materials I’ve made to give the scene more depth and detail.

The image was exported in three layers, one for the model and environment, one for the festival logo, and one for the background. From there I created the image border and text in a separate program and exported the image to be printable in A3, 300DPI.