In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how you can create a minimalist poster for the Green Lantern using Adobe Illustrator. It is assumed that you already have a basic knowledge of Illustrator and know how to use the Pen tool.

Picking out the key features

Before you begin designing and building the poster, you need to pick out the key features that will be easily recognisable to anyone who glances at the poster. Below is one of the original movie posters that I’m using as inspiration. I’ve circled all of the features in the poster that are important to the superhero’s identity, such as the clenched fist and ring that powers, the mask and the insignia of the Green Lantern Corps.

Green Lantern movie poster with key features circled

Based on this exercise, you can determine which would be the best features you focus on when designing your poster. In the example, I’ll decided to use the image of a clenched fist with the Green Lantern ring as the main visual for the poster.

You should look at the colours used on the poster. Are there any colours that feature prominently and make the identity stand out? Remember, minimalist posters are meant to be very basic, so try to limit your colour palette to four or five colours.

Planning the layout

It’s a good idea to sketch out a few poster designs on paper before you start building your poster in Illustrator. This will give you the chance to play around with your layout and make a list of resources that you might need (textures, fonts, colours, etc.) Once you have the plan in place, you can gather any resources you need and start creating the poster in Illustrator.

Initial poster idea sketched on layout paper

If you want to recreate my example, the resources can be downloaded by clicking on the button below:

Building the poster

Open Illustrator and create a new A4 document. Go to File > Place and locate “fist.tif” on your computer and place it into the document. In the Layers palette, rename Layer 1 to “fist sketch” and lock the layer. This will stop you from accidentally moving the image when you’re tracing it.

Using the Pen tool, trace the fist sketch. Take your time and use the Direct Selection tool and the other Pen tool options to edit the paths if needed. You can see that I’ve worked across several layers and used different stroke colours. I find it helpful to work in this way as it makes it easier to locate, edit and delete paths if I need to.

Once you’ve finishing tracing, the next stage is to colour the image. I used the Eyedropper tool to take some samples of colour from a scan of a Green Lantern comic. The Eyedropper tool will recreate any colour you click on and store it in your Fill or Stroke colour boxes (whichever is active at the time) at the bottom of the toolbox. To save the colour to your Swatches palette for use later, click on the New Swatch button at the bottom of the Swatches palette. The colour will be stored as a swatch at the end of the swatch list (after all the default colours already stored there, if any).

Once you have your colours, change the Fill colour on each of the items. Remove the Stroke line from any shapes (such as the fist outline and insignia) by clicking the None button for the Stroke. Stroke lines add unnecessary detail to the image, so you only need them to define the fingers and thumb.

In the example, I also created a three-colour gradient for the background and added a couple of extra layers to make shadows for the fingers and thumb.

You’re now going to add a concrete texture to make the image appear more “grungy”. Create a new layer and place  the “grunge.jpg” into the document. Resize it to fill the whole page and cover the items you’ve drawn. With the texture selected, go to the Transparency palette and change the blending mode of the layer to Multiply and reduce the opacity to 30%. This will combine the texture with the coloured objects to make an old, rough effect.

Place “foldedpaper.png” in a new layer. Resize the texture and use the Transparency palette to change the blending mode to Overlay and reduce opacity to 65%.

That’s the main image of the poster finished. At this point you may wish to add a tag line in an appropriate font and adjust the layout to finish off the poster.

I scaled down the fist image, added the tag line in the space above it using the Futura font at 24pt and vertically aligned all the objects to the centre of the document using the Align palette.

Finished Green Lantern poster