Revive the look of Megaman for a modern design age
What is the Megaman Project?
Apart from design and cooking I really enjoy playing video games, in particular Megaman is one of my favorites; the old-school versions to be precise. While this project is not necessarily a professional piece of work, it did provide me with new insights into poster design and illustration. Megaman has been around for more than 20 years, and I thought he needed a new style or approach to marketing himself. I chose to do a series of posters that featured main characters from the video games and one shirt that put him in new light of sorts. The project was purely from a creative perspective and was only for my own self benefit.
Influences for the project.
One of the problems with the game intially was that it always had poor marketing in the United States. Box art for the Japanese versions were always more interesting and provided more of a kid friendly approach. I decided to use art from the old Japanese boxes and come up with the first two posters by using a similar style of presenting the characters.
The third poster was a bit different.
With the third poster I wanted more of a darker and ambiguous look to it. The character's past really lent to something unique. The fashion in which Zero is portrayed in Megaman has always been more sinister when it comes to revealing his past.
The process of creating a poster.
Essentially each poster began as a sketch in my Moleskine. I wanted to make sure I had a proper idea of what needed to be accomplished before I went to the computer. It was very important to get shapes right on paper, because it would only make creating them in illustrator that much harder.
After the initial sketches were scanned in, I brought them into illustrator and started tracing away. The process of layering and coloring different parts in illustrator is very similar to drawing on paper, so it was a quick process.
After I was satisfied with the outcome, I took the illustrations into photoshop and began adding affects to each poster. Most of the elements are textures and brushes detailed into the character with a Wacom tablet. The final outcome is then produced in high quality for print.
The process of adding affects to each poster is probably the most interesting, mainly because a lot of it is unplanned and once a desired style is achieved the process only gets more intuitive.
The propaganda of Megaman
A short while after I created these posters my lust for Megaman related design had not been fulfilled. Thusly, I felt the need to create more posters; c'est la vie. Anyway, I sought out to make something no one had really done yet with Megaman, and put a propaganda spin on the them. I created a couple of drawings initially. Each poster centered around a different style of propaganda, and mixed different eras of style. I wanted to use influences from WWII, Russian propaganda, and some Chinese propaganda. I sketched quite a few posters with these styles in mind and came to three that I felt would succeed. The only discretion here is the mixture of the original Megaman series and the X series in reference to the 'Hunters' class.
The final piece of Megaman, the shirt.
After I had finished the posters, I felt there was something more I wanted to do. I knew that Megaman needed a harder edge. He's often portrayed too childish which needed to be changed. I thought about what makes Megaman different from just an average robot, clearly his buster cannon or that giant gun-arm-thingy sets him apart. Clearly he is not making kittens with that arm-gun, he's blowing stuff up and doing it with style. The shirt was born from this idea, I had always wanted to make Megaman out to be a badass, and I believe the shirt accomplishes it.
It's a good thing Dr. Light built me stronger than Humpty-Dumpty.
