16. Art Directors Club

Matthew Leibowitz

An advertisement placed in and Art Directors’ Club Annual

15. Soviet

Klutis, Gustav 1931
The USSR is the Avant Garde of the World Proletariat

14. Polio

Matter, Herbert 1950
The goal here was to try and recreate the look of the photo as close as possible. I want to increase what I am able to do in  terms of styles and  effects,  with black and white photos.

Really went round the houses on this one. In the end the solution was simple. Easy when you know how!

Started out with the following photo swings1951.jpg. Using the pen tool make a selection of the children in the foreground, and making a vector mask.

To the left is the result of the vector mask. Flipped the image ⌘T – Flip Horizontal, and  jumped ⌘J each to its own layer for repositioning.

These settings are applied to give the image its final look.

What is important in the levels dialogue is the bottom slider white position of 212. This seem to even out the white of the image to that of the background, which was what I was looking for.

Sometimes luck helps!

13. No Way Out

Rand, Paul 1950

12. Suddeutsche Zeitung

Riewe ? 1958 Germany.

A simple composition, yet effective . It boils down to a bit of clever masking.

11. Olympia

Max Velthuys 1955, Germany

Drawing – tracing in Illustrator – ⌘C + ⌘V into Photoshop as a smart object.

The background is generated by the following perl script:

A very simple script which generates random numbers between 0 and 9, 40 per row, 60 rows. The output is saved into a text file for use in the Photoshop file.

The font use is Typewriter Condensed from dafont.com. Other than that  using recently acquired techniques.

10. Jeugd

Atlelir Lumax (The Netherlands) 1932

Used the Pen tool to create vector masks to isolate the 3 main images. Clipping masks for the the frames to the left.

The difficult thing ( for me ) here was trying to make the images to be based on only two colours. With a lot of trial and error, and a little research I found that the solution is  create duotone images.

Each image begins as  a smart object, that way the duo tone can be create idepently of the main file. This is important as one of the steps is to make the image greyscale which would affect the whole file

Starting with the original image

1. Image > Mode > Greyscale
2. Image > Mode > Duotone

Its necessary to adjust the contours to acheive the desired effect. The settings can be save and .ado ( Adobe Photoshop Duotone Extensions ) and reused for the other images.

9. PKZ

Fischer, Corso Heiri PKZ 1952

Isolated the arm of this image using the Pen tool as a starting point. Tried several filter combinations to come up with effect similar to the arm in the poster

Eventually settled on this combination. Its not ideal. Need practice. Moving on ..

8. Caffaro

Laskoff, Franz 1901

Drawing – scanning – Illustrator tracing – ⌘C + ⌘V to Photoshop as a smart object

The  colours and textures applied as show in the panel above with blend mode = multiply

The fonts were pretty good matches. Both were found at dafont.com

• Main title: shrbitov.ttf
• Other text: WANDA___.ttf

As a non-drawer, pretty pleased with the initial drawing. OK I know it simple but I still like how it turned out. The same can be said of the tracing. Ended up quite a nice reproduction.

Need to attempt a more complex Art Nouveau poster

7. Avad Tanuja

Gorog, Lagos (Hungary) 1961, Witness for the prosecution.

What I like about this poster is that it combines photography, illustration and an expressive use of typography. It gives me ideas of how I might use type more expressively in my own work.

Started with the image knife in hand 2 available from sxc.hu, File > Place – traced in  Illustrator – Distort & Transform > Roughen, and repositioning to get the desired look.

The same technique is used to make the borders for the main title. The document is ready to be imported into Photoshop.

Now for the blue and green tints on either side of main image. Basically this image in the Marlene Dietrich folder is sandwiched between the tints above and  a solid black layer below. The vector masks cut through to the texture right at the bottom. The layer masks mask sure the tints are only applied to each side of the knife. The tint layers are set to blend mode = multiply

Started the the image of marlene to the left. Applied a vector mask to isolate the face. Looks pretty course at this point. Next I ⌘ Clicked the vector mask  to load it  as a selection. Then ⌘J to jump the selection to a new  layer.

With the selection loaded on the new layer, the next step was Select > Refine Edge ( ⌥⌘R)   to bring up the the Refine Edge dialogue and feather the edges for a much smoother transition, followed by Edit > Transform > Flip Horizontal to face the other direction as in the original poster.

To stlye the image similar to the poster I applied Filter > Artistic > Poster Edges. It not a great match, but Its the best I can do right now. Theres a lot of new techniques going on in this attempt so Im kind of pleased.