Around the end of fall 2015, I was asked by Alexandre André, creative director at Marketel, a Montreal-based ad agency, to realize the necessary elements making up the different promotional tools for the expo: “World War Women”, currently showing at the Canadian War Museum, in Ottawa.
Below is the poster mockup presented to me as the basis for the project. It has been realized by art director Geneviève Robert.
My mandate was to realize the different elements of this poster as well as all the other uses of this image.
It has been established that the photo of the young woman below (property of Getty Images) was to be used and that she would be wearing six different sets of clothes: 30’s-40’s housedress, CWAC uniform (1939-45), RCAF uniform (1939-45), Navy uniform (1939-45), Nurse uniform (1914-18), and ammunition factory worker’s (“Rosie”) dress (1939-45).
All the elements were to be independent, “stand alone” in Photoshop.
Here are a few of the references that I used for this project:
Here are the approved preliminary sketches :
Here are some watercolor stages:
For the hairstyles, I chose to make composites from photos rather than painting them. That is also what I did for the buttons and military decorations.
After the painting stage was over, I scanned the artwork, then cutout and fit the dresses to the woman’s hi-res photo. For the army uniforms, I used the same sleeve for the 3 uniforms. Here again, some adjustments were necessary.
Then came the coloring stage. As the tones were well defined at the painting stage, it was generally enough to use flat colors on a different photoshop layer in “multiply” mode, although that could not be applied in all cases. There was much digital work left to do at this stage.
The skin tone was also altered so as to be more like a colorized black and white old photo.
Now, the plane. The client asked that it should be a Hawker Hurricane rather than a bomber as on the mockup.
As the angle of the plane had to be very precise and as it would be hard to obtain the exact angle that the art director had in mind, I chose to buy a small scale model and to take as many photos of it as necessary to match the desired angle.
After a few hundred photos (thanks you iphone!) this one was accepted :
Here is the final version:
Below is the final poster, and a short film as finalized by the excellent team at the agency:
Here is the link to the Canadian War Museum
They liked it so much that they had these made:
A nice word from the client!
Thank you Marketel for such a great project!