Next month one of the most anticipated movies of the year will open in the theaters, I am talking about Man of Steel, the new Superman movie. It’s amazing how much promotion this movie is getting lately, every day there’s a new picture, poster or some news about it. With all of that, of course I also get really inspired to create some artwork about it. I’ve created the symbol in the past using Illustrator and Photoshop a few weeks ago. Now I will create a simple poster, this time however I will use the new Pixelmator 2.2 to test it out.
So in this post I will walk you through the creative process behind my minimalist poster for the Man of Steel movie. I will use Pixelmator’s new features like the Vector Tools and Light Leak effects.
Step 1
Open Pixelmator and then grab the latest poster of the movie to use for reference and to trace superman.
Step 2
Using the Pen Tool, start tracing the silhouette of superman. Don’t add to many points and also don’t worry if it’s not super perfect. You can always edit that later.
Step 3
Here’s the final trace.
Step 4
Fill the background with a dark blue using the Paint Bucket Tool (N). Change the superman color to white.
Step 5
Using the Rectangle Shape Tool create 2 lines like the image below.
Step 6
Add the text. If you notice the kerning of the text is really crazy, I changed to 250%.
Step 7
With the rectangle shape tool, add another rectangle with no color and white for the stroke. Select inside for the options and then use 50px for the stroke width. The idea here is to add a simple white border to the composition.
Step 8
This is not really necessary, I prefer the version without the effect but you can also add a nice vintage look by using the new Light Leak Effects in Pixelmator. Just select the background color and then drag it to the composition. I used Nebula with 100% for the Amount and 65% for Sunniness.
Conclusion
The poster is done. It was a great exercise to test the new Pixelmator and some of the new features. I can also say that Pixelmator is faster than ever and getting more complete at each release. It’s a nice alternative if you don’t want to pay Adobe’s subscription. There are some important tools missing but I am sure they will be added in the next release.
Applications
Download Pixelmator file
Click here to download the Pixelmator file used for this tutorial
